JUE Insight: Zoning and property taxation revisited—Was Hamilton right?

In rare theoretical treatments of ideas developed by Hamilton (1975, 1976) almost fifty wears ago, recent papers by Barseghyan and Coate (2016) and Calabrese et al. (2007) develop dynamic models to analyze zoning and property taxation in a system of communities. Their analyses led to negative conclusions, contradicting Hamilton's view, by showing that efficient zoning does not emerge in equilibrium. The purpose of this note is to show that a different, affirmative conclusion can be reached in a simpler, highly stylized model that formalizes Hamilton's idea.