Public Land Development (PLD) is an active form of land policy that is mainly used in the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and China. In PLD, the public authority buys the land in an area of interest, prepares the plan for the area, rearranges the plots, provides infrastructure, and sells the serviced plots to developers for development. Some literature suggests that PLD gives control over land supply, which may lead to more timely plan implementation. However, other work indicates that PLD may not offer better outcomes than other forms of land development policies in terms of timing of development and implementation of housing plans. In this context, the use of PLD as a significant public intervention in the land market is difficult to rationalize.

In this paper, we focus our investigation on the impact of PLD on housing plan implementation. In addition, we investigate if PLD has any advantages compared to other forms of land development policies.

Our empirical analysis focuses on the Netherlands. We construct a panel of approved housing plans in Dutch municipalities from 2010 to 2019 and estimate the impact of PLD on plan implementation using survival models.