Land Values and Housing Rents in Urban Japan

This paper describes and systematically explains observed variation in land values and housing rents in urban Japan. It fits a structural model's reduced form equations to intertemporal data over 35 years, intercity data across 27 major cities, and intracity data in the three largest metropolitan areas. Explanatory variables are population, income, their growth rates, the interest rate, the inflation rate, urban land supply, and distance from the city center.