Modeling why redevelopment is slow and lumpy

Vincent Rollet’s MIT job market paper on zoning and the dynamics of urban redevelopment — which won Best Student Paper at the 2025 European UEA meeting and lands him at Stanford and then UChicago — is getting attention from actual city planning staff beyond academia. Rollet built a parcel-level panel of 833,000 NYC lots and estimates a dynamic spatial equilibrium model that captures something the static literature misses: redevelopment is slow, lumpy, and driven by fixed costs that rise sharply with existing building size. The fact that planners are paying attention matters: this is the kind of structural model that can discipline a rezoning’s projected supply impact in ways the usual back-of-envelope feasibility studies cannot.