Results

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Why higher house prices lead to higher borrowing

In the past three decades, house prices and mortgage debt in the UK have risen much faster than income. In other words, people end up borrowing more money when house prices go up. This finding goes against many canonical...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Why building new towns isn't the answer to the UK's housing crisis

The UK's new government is intent on building 1.5 million homes over the next five years. It's all part of the plan to address the housing supply and affordability crisis. Many of these homes are to be built in the form...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Labour's planning reforms - how to make housing targets work

Labour promised serious reforms to the planning system while in opposition. What it has proposed now that it's in Government, including reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework, is very far from a fundamental re...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Labour's planning reforms - building on grey belts and missed opportunities

Perhaps the proposal that people are most aware of when it comes to Labour's planning reform plans, the one that hit the headlines, is the idea of potentially re-defining small areas of green belts as "grey belt land". T...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Housing-consumption channel of mortgage demand

We quantify the housing-consumption channel in mortgage demand according to which households borrow more following house-price increases since housing and non-housing consumption are imperfect substitutes. To identify th...Read more...

Blog

Jam Tomorrow (Podcast):

The Green Belt: Fields forever? (podcast)

Ros Taylor talks to LSE professor Paul Cheshire and journalist Jonn Elledge about the problems facing Labour as it tries to persuade Britons of the need for more housing and infrastructure. And Paul Cheshire sets out a p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Avenging the tenants: Regulating the middle man's rents

We explore the role of intermediaries in the rental market. Using novel UK data on fees letting agencies charged to both tenants and landlords, combined with a matched property-agency listings dataset, we study the effec...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Housing and planning

The housing affordability crisis not only restricts access to decent housing, or housing at all, but it has adverse effects on equality, social cohesion, retirement planning, productivity and economic growth....Read more...

CentrePiece article

The economic costs of the failing planning system

Paul Cheshire began to investigate the economic effects of the UK’s planning system 40 years ago. Here he draws on a recent public lecture – and panel discussion with Stephen Aldridge, Kate Barker and Simon Wolfson – to ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Land use regulation, homeownership and wealth inequality

We examine the role that housing market regulatory restrictiveness plays in differentially affecting the net wealth of owners and renters over time, and its contribution to wealth inequality. In tightly regulated desirab...Read more...

External publication

Labour Economics: Thinking through Labour's economic agenda

With the Labour Party having vowed to achieve the fastest growth in the G7, the Social Market Foundation has brought together leading economic experts to provide independent analysis of the party's proposed approach - an...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why delay? Understanding the construction lag, aka the build out rate

We explore the determinants of the speed of residential development after dwelling construction starts. Using a sample of over 140,000 residential developments in England from 1996 to 2015 and employing an instrumental v...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization:

House price expectations

This study examines short-, medium-, and long-run price expectations in housing markets. At the heart of our analysis is the combination of data from a tailored in-person household survey, past sale offerings, satellite ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy :

Local Retail Prices, Product Variety, and Neighborhood Change

We study how local grocery markets within a city are affected by changes in housing markets. Our empirical strategy exploits a shift in the spatial distribution of construction activity induced by a large-scale, place-ba...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact:

Dashboards have the power to make complex research accessible to the public and policymakers

While researchers often point to the relevance of their research, economic models and econometric methods are typically inaccessible to a wider audience. Gabriel Ahlfeldt explains how interactive dashboards represent a u...Read more...

Blog

LSE USAPP:

Corporate landlords are eroding the American dream of homeownership, especially in black neighborhoods

There has been a growing trend for institutional investors to purchase single-family homes and convert them to permanent rental properties. At the same time, homeownership rates for black households have declined on par ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics: Forthcoming

On the economic impacts of mortgage credit expansion policies: Evidence from help to buy

We take advantage of two spatial discontinuities in Britain's Help to Buy (HtB) scheme to explore the effectiveness and distributional implications of mortgage credit expansion policies. Employing a Difference-in-Discont...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Planning may be a political hot potato but radical reform cannot wait

Planning - largely because of the cruel growth in the unaffordability of housing - has risen up the political agenda. Reforms are urgently needed to allow more homes to be built, but change is notoriously difficult. Ahea...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The skyscraper revolution: Global economic development and land savings

Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17,...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How can UK policy-makers make homes more affordable?

Housing in the UK has become seriously unaffordable; the problem is likely to get worse and younger people are being hit the hardest. Reforms that could be effective in solving the crisis are considered politically infea...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Does homeownership reduce crime? A radical housing reform from the UK

"Right to Buy" (RTB), a large-scale natural experiment whereby incumbent tenants in public housing could buy properties at heavily-subsidised prices, increased the UK homeownership rate by over 10 percentage points betwe...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

A true housing crisis needs more than post-truth politicians

The UK's housing crisis is particularly acute by international standards. Instead of identifying real solutions, argues Paul Cheshire, policy-makers have offered only rhetorical devices, ineffective local mechanisms, and...Read more...

Chapter

Housing

in Policy Landscape 2023

What are the public policy challenges confronting the UK? What plans do the parties have for addressing them? To what extent are these plans fit for purpose? As Parliament returns from its summer recess, Full Fact and U...Read more...

CEP Insights

Social mobility

How much of an individual's success depends on their own hard work and how much on what their parents do for a living? A country where children from poor families are likely to be poor as adults and elite positions in so...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

How can we make homes more affordable?

Housing has become unaffordable, the problem is likely to get worse, and the young are hit the hardest. Christian Hilber argues that we face a conundrum: reforms that would be effective are considered politically infeasi...Read more...

Journal article

The Journal of Economic Inequality:

Intergenerational home ownership

This paper studies intergenerational links in home ownership, an increasingly important wealth marker and a measure of economic status in itself. Repeated cross sectional UK data show that home ownership rates have falle...Read more...

Blog

LSE IQ:

How can we make homes more affordable? (Podcast)

In this LSE IQ episode on how we can make homes more affordable, Christian Hilber shares the reasons behind the UK's current housing affordability crisis, explaining the obstacles to building more houses as a way of over...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics :

Micro-geographic property price and rent indices

We develop a programming algorithm that predicts a balanced-panel mix-adjusted house price index for arbitrary spatial units from repeated cross-sections of geocoded micro data. The algorithm combines parametric and non-...Read more...

Chapter

Housing policy and affordable housing

in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance

Lack of affordable housing is a growing and often primary policy concern in cities throughout the world. The main underlying cause for the "affordability crisis," which has been mounting for decades, is a combination of ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Policies for affordable housing: options and obstacles

The crisis of housing affordability has been mounting for decades, driven by growing demand for properties in desirable areas where supply is limited. Numerous policies have been enacted across countries, but many are in...Read more...

Blog

UCLA Housing Voice:

Skyscrapers with Gabriel Ahlfeldt (podcast)

Skyscrapers! We can't help but find them fascinating. Some cities are full of skyscrapers, and others have none. Developers built a 70-story tower on that parcel, but the proposed building just down the street is only 30...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Why is it so difficult to tackle the lack of affordable housing?

Boris Johnson has pledged that more people will be helped onto the property ladder and that the supply of housing will be improved. Christian Hilber and Olivier Schoni consider the history of housing policy and the chall...Read more...

Blog

The Sutton Trust:

Gloomy prospects for social mobility in the pandemic era

Lee Elliot Major and Andrew Eyles explain how a gap in missed education between richer and poorer children was exacerbated by stark home learning divides and the likely consequences for social mobility....Read more...

External publication

Social mobility: past, present and future

Andrew Eyles, Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin forecast that relative income mobility levels in the UK could fall by as much as 12%, driven by learning loss in schools....Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics of the Household:

Do individuals adapt to all types of housing transitions?

This paper provides one of the first tests of adaptation to the complete set of residential transitions. We use long-run SOEP panel data and consider the impact of all housing transitions, whether or not they involve a c...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Housing policy and affordable housing

Lack of affordable housing is a growing and often primary policy concern in cities around the world. The main underlying cause for the 'affordability crisis', which has been mounting for decades, is a combination of stro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

House price expectations

This study examines short-, medium-, and long-run price expectations in housing markets. We derive and test six hypothesis about the incidence, formation, and relevance of price expectations. To do so, we use data from a...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:

How Do Households Value the Future? Evidence from Property Taxes

Despite the near ubiquity of intertemporal choice, there is little consensus on the rate at which individuals trade present and future costs and benefits. We contribute to this debate by estimating discount rates from ex...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Local retail prices, product varieties and neighborhood change

We study how local grocery prices within a city are affected by changes in housing markets. Our empirical strategy is based on an exogenous shift in the spatial distribution of construction activity induced by a large-sc...Read more...

Journal article

Health and Place:

Income-related health inequality in urban China (1991-2015): the role of homeownership and housing conditions

Unprecedented economic growth has been experienced over the several decades worldwide, but such rapid economic growth wasn't accompanied by equally-substantial improvement in health, especially health inequalities betwee...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

The amplifying effect of capitalization rates on housing supply

We provide empirical evidence that increases in housing rental income lead to a larger supply response than price increases of the same percentage value. We rationalize this differential in supply responsiveness with an ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Rising sea levels and the future of coastal cities

Despite the higher susceptibility to floods and a growing climate crisis, more than 10% of the world's population lives in low-elevation coastal zones - and that share is increasing. Guy Michaels and colleagues present a...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Housing Economics:

Do long-distance moves discourage homeownership? Evidence from England

We hypothesize that as the distance of a residential move increases, the amount and quality of information collected on the destination housing market fall. This in turn increases the chances of making an ill-informed ho...Read more...

CentrePiece article

UK house prices in Covid-19 times

The pandemic lead to increased demand for bigger homes and gardens. With housing supply limited by strict UK planning regulations and the market propped up by a stamp duty waiver and the furlough scheme, prices of detach...Read more...

Blog

Grantham Institute blogs:

The answer to housing's stubborn carbon emissions problem: green offsets

Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber propose 'green offsets' to reduce property taxes in a way that is strictly scaled to energy efficiency, as a simple intervention to address the UK's urgent need to reduce its residentia...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Judge dread: court severity, repossession risk and demand in mortgage and housing markets

We study the impact of borrower protection on mortgage and housing demand. We focus on variation in the likelihood that a house is repossessed - conditional on the mortgage being in arrears and taken to court - coming fr...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

Local economic conditions and the nature of new housing supply

We explore the effects of local economic conditions on the type and size of newly constructed housing units in a city. Exploiting the 1984–2004 metro area samples of the American Housing Survey and US Census building per...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

A year in the UK labour market: what's happened over the coronavirus pandemic?

Jonathan Wadsworth explains how the performance of the UK labour market during Covid-19 shows that the most notable effects of a downturn caused by restrictions on mobility are the more dynamic aspects: falls in hours, h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trends in intergenerational home ownership and wealth transmission

Prior research on trends in intergenerational mobility in economic status has focused chiefly on income and earnings. There is hardly any research on trends in intergenerational wealth transmission, at least in part beca...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Why central London has seen the biggest rises in house prices, despite Covid

As many predicted, the pandemic led to a demand for bigger homes and gardens. But with supply limited by Britain's strict planning regulations, and the market propped up by a stamp duty waiver and the furlough scheme, pr...Read more...

Journal article

Real Estate Economics: Forthcoming

Offices scarce but housing scarcer: Estimating the premium for London office conversions

British planning is among the most restrictive in the world and has been restrictive for longer than elsewhere. Restrictive regulation substantially increases the costs of office space and, especially in London, increase...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Market tremors: Shale gas exploration, earthquakes, and their impact on house prices

Shale gas has grown to become a major new source of energy in countries around the globe. While its importance for energy supply is well recognized, there has also been public concern over potential risks from hydraulic ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Will coronavirus cause a big city exodus?

Big cities thrive because of the economic and social benefits of proximity – but proximity also helps to spread Covid-19. Does this mean an end to the urban revival of recent years – or do vaccines herald a return to nor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why have house prices risen so much more than rents in superstar cities?

In most countries – particularly in supply constrained superstar cities – house prices have risen much more strongly than rents over the last two decades. We provide an explanation that does not rely on falling interest ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quality of life in a dynamic spatial model

We develop a dynamic spatial model in which heterogeneous workers are imperfectly mobile and forward-looking and yet all structural fundamentals can be inverted without assuming that the economy is in a stationary spatia...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

The making of the modern metropolis: evidence from London

Using newly constructed spatially disaggregated data for London from 1801 to 1921, we show that the invention of the steam railway led to the first large-scale separation of workplace and residence. We show that a class ...Read more...

Blog

CEP Urban and Spatial Programme Blog:

Planning for the future: some solutions for our housing crisis at last?

The white paper, Planning for the future, published in early August 2020 represents the first serious attempt to reform our dysfunctional land use planning system since its inception. Although the Barker report’s diagnos...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Offices scarce but housing scarcer: estimating the premium for London office conversions

The British system of land use planning is one of the most restrictive in the world. It substantially increases the costs of office space (Cheshire & Hilber, 2008; Cheshire & Dericks, 2020) and, especially in London, inc...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Covid-19 and housing: while prices may fall, homes will remain unaffordable

Discussing the potential effects of COVID-19 on housing, Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber write that real house prices and rents may initially fall. Yet housing will remain unaffordable for the young and those on lower...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does homeownership reduce crime? A radical housing reform in Britain

“Right to Buy” (RTB), a large-scale natural experiment by which incumbent tenants in public housing could buy properties at heavily-subsidised prices, increased the homeownership rate in Britain by over 10 percentage poi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

On the economic impacts of mortgage credit expansion policies: evidence from help to buy

Mortgage credit expansion policies - such as UK's Help to Buy (HtB) - aim to increase access to and affordability of owner-occupied housing and are widespread around the world. We take advantage of spatial discontinuitie...Read more...

CEP election analysis

#GE2019Economists: the research evidence on key issues for voters in the 2019 UK General Election

The general election of 2019 was called after negotiations over how the UK should leave the European Union became increasingly tortuous. While Brexit may have been the trigger for the election, it was far from being the ...Read more...

Blog

CEP Urban and Spatial Programme Blog:

Housing: 'no shortage' - is it nonsense?

Paul Cheshire questions arguments that Britain is not suffering from a housing shortage, pointing out errors in common understanding....Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The UK’s housing crisis: what should the next government do?

Since 2015, neither the government nor any opposition party has had any effective policy to tackle our housing crisis symbolised most starkly by Starter Homes. To the extent there has been action, it is largely ineffecti...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Housing

Housing affordability is a key concern of an ever-larger fraction of UK voters who are crammed into artificially limited space. It also underlies the sense of being shut out of prosperity and unable to escape declining l...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spillover effects from new housing supply

I estimate spillovers from new housing supply on house prices, crime rates, and household income. To estimate these effects, I use exogenous variation in supply induced by a housing subsidy implemented in middle-income n...Read more...

External publication

Homes on the right tracks

Technically, there is an easy solution to the UK crisis of housing supply: find more land for housing. This is not a physical problem but a political one. The land is there but policies and habits of thought prevent its ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Childhood circumstances and young adult outcomes: the role of parental financial problems

Is there a relationship between childhood circumstances and outcomes later on in life? Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D’Ambrosio, and Marta Barazzetta consider the cognitive and non-cognitive consequences on young adults who ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Affordability, financial innovation and the start of the housing boom

At their peak in 2005, roughly 60 percent of all purchase mortgage loans originated in the United States contained at least one non-traditional feature. These features, which allowed borrowers easier access to credit thr...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

The preservation of historic districts - Is it worth it?

Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

The bedroom tax

Housing subsidies for low income households are a central pillar of many welfare systems, but an expensive one. This paper investigates the consequences of an unusual policy aimed at reducing the cost of these subsidies ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Housing Economics:

Institutional settings and urban sprawl: Evidence from Europe

This article explores the role of institutional settings in determining spatial variation in urban sprawl across Europe. We first synthesize the emerging literature that links land use policies and local fiscal incentive...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Housing Economics:

Housing in Europe: A different continent – A continent of differences

This article provides the introduction to the special issue on ‘Housing in Europe: a different continent – a continent of differences’ in the Journal of Housing Economics in 2018. Europe is a large continent with a long ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Second home investments

Investment in second homes has been surging around the world. Christian Hilber explores the underlying causes of this boom and the political backlash against wealthy investors. His analysis explains how one increasingly ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How do households value the future? Evidence from property taxes

Despite the near ubiquity of inter-temporal choice, there is little consensus on the rate at which individuals trade present and future costs and benefits. We contribute to this debate by estimating discount rates from e...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

History dependence in the housing market

Using data on the universe of housing transactions in England and Wales over a twenty-year period, we document a robust pattern of history dependence in housing markets. Sale prices and selling propensities are affected ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

The Time Value of Housing: Historical Evidence on Discount Rates

Most London housing transactions involve trading long leases of varying lengths. We exploit this to estimate the time value of housing – the relationship between the price of a property and the term of ownership – over a...Read more...

Journal article

National Institute Economic Review:

Broken Market or Broken Policy? The Unintended Consequences of Restrictive Planning

This paper summarises the evidence from recent research relating to the British Planning system's impact on the supply of development. Planning serves important economic and social purposes but it is essential to disting...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The bedroom tax

The ‘bedroom tax’ – a UK government policy introduced in 2013 that cut housing benefits for social tenants deemed to have a ‘spare’ bedroom – saved some public money, according to research by Steve Gibbons and colleagues...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economic impacts of constraining home investments

We investigate how political backlash against wealthy investors in high-amenity places affects local residents. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment: the ‘Swiss Second Home Initiative’, which banned the construction of ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does gentrification displace poor households? An 'identification-via-interaction' approach

My theoretical model motivates an ‘identification-via-interaction’ (IvI) approach that separates the causal impact of gentrification on poor exits from endogenous channels. In the empirical analysis, I create a measure o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The bedroom tax

Housing subsidies for low income households are a central pillar of many welfare systems, but an expensive one. This paper investigates the consequences of an unusual policy aimed at reducing the burden of these subsidie...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Empty homes, longer commutes

In areas of Britain where there are empty houses, planners typically allocate less land for development and make it more difficult to build or adapt houses. Research by Paul Cheshire, Christian Hilber and Hans Koster exp...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Empty homes, longer commutes: The unintended consequences of more restrictive local planning

We investigate the impact of land use regulation on housing vacancy rates. Using a 30-year panel dataset on land use regulation for 350 English Local Authorities (LAs) and addressing potential reverse causation and other...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Life in a slum: Understanding living conditions in Nairobi's slums across time and space

This paper overviews the role of slums in urban Africa, focusing on Nairobi. It reveals the characteristics of slums and how these have changed over time. Spatially disaggregated data show that slum areas are very dense ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Decomposing the Impact of Immigration on House Prices

An inflow of immigrants into a region impacts house prices in three ways. For a fixed level of local population, housing demand rises due to the increase in foreign-born population. In addition, immigrants can influence ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Housing Allowance and Rents: Evidence from a Stepwise Subsidy Scheme

This paper studies the effect of housing demand subsidies on rents using discontinuities in the Finnish housing allowance system as a quasi-experimental setting. The stepwise dependence of housing allowance on the floor ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Social Tenants' Health: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Landlord Interventions

Objectives: To test whether a social landlord can improve health outcomes for older tenants and reduce their NHS usage by simple interventions. Design: Randomised controlled trial. Setting: Social housing in five London ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Home ownership and social mobility

There is much talk about the difficulties that many young people in Britain face in trying to acquire their first home. Research by Jo Blanden and Stephen Machin explores the links between home ownership and social mobil...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Superstar houses and the American mortgage frenzy

Clement Bellet shows how visible wealth inequality fuelled the US mortgage boom that preceded the financial crisis....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Home ownership and social mobility

This paper extends the literature on social mobility to investigate intergenerational links in home ownership, an important marker of wealth. Repeated cross sectional data show that home ownership rates have fallen rapid...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The paradox of the Joneses: superstar houses and mortgage frenzy in suburban America

Despite a major upscaling of suburban houses over the last decades, house satisfaction has remained steady in the United States. I show that upward comparison in size can explain this paradox, as top housing size mirrore...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Fear of fracking: the impact on UK house prices

Shale gas offers the prospect of a low-cost energy future – but does extracting it invoke anxieties about the possibility of environmental catastrophe among local residents? Research by Steve Gibbons and colleagues detec...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Fear of Fracking? The Impact of the Shale Gas Exploration on House Prices in Britain

Shale gas has grown to become a major new source of energy in countries around the globe. While its importance for energy supply is well recognized, there has also been public concern over potential risks – such as dama...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Traffic Externalities and Housing Prices: Evidence from the London Congestion Charge

This study exploits the introduction of the London Congestion Charge (CC) that greatly improves traffic conditions in Central London to provide new evidence on the capitalization of traffic externalities onto housing val...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Preservation of Historic Districts - Is it Worth it?

I investigate the welfare effect of conservation areas that preserve historic districts by regulating development. Such regulation may improve quality of life but does so by reducing housing productivity – the efficiency...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Enabled to Work: The Impact of Government Housing on Slum Dwellers in South Africa

This paper looks at the link between housing conditions and household income and labour market participation in South Africa. I use four waves of panel data from 2002-2009 on households that were originally living in inf...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Building the City: Urban Transition and Institutional Frictions

We model the building of a city, estimate parameters of the model, and calculate welfare losses from institutional frictions encountered in changing land-use. We distinguish formal and slum construction technologies; in ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Credit Constraints and the Composition of Housing Sales. Farewell to First-Time Buyers?

During the housing bust of 2008–2009, home prices and transaction volumes fell across the entire United Kingdom. However, while the fall in prices was similar across housing types, transaction volumes fell more for homes...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Regulating Housing Vacancies Away? The Paradoxical Effects of Mismatch

Policy makers agree that vacant houses are undesirable. Moreover the existence of empty houses is used as an argument for allocating less land for new construction. So higher vacancy rates tend to trigger tighter restric...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Immigration, Housing Discrimination and Employment

We use a new data set on Italy and a novel identification strategy to analyse the relationship between migrants' employment status and the percentage of non-Italians living nearby. Our data contain information at the ver...Read more...

CEP election analysis

#ElectionEconomics: The Research Evidence on Key Issues for Voters in the 2015 UK General Election

Please see the CEP #ElectionEconomics report(Paper 1)and the Executive Summary (Paper 2) that cover all the election 2015 briefings, discussing the research evidence on 15 of the UK's key policy battlegrounds: immigratio...Read more...

CEP election analysis

UK Housing and Planning Policies: the evidence from economic research

Housing affordability is a key concern of an ever-larger fraction of UK voters who are crammed into artificially limited space. At the same time, a lot of wealth lies in housing assets and there are many vested interests...Read more...

CEP election analysis

The Economic Performance of UK Cities: Can Urban and Regional Policy Make a Difference to the North-South Divide

There are large variations in economic performance across UK cities and on some measures, they have widened since the global financial crisis. All main parties promise action to reduce them, but there is little differenc...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Gone with the wind

Wind farms reduce house prices in postcodes where the turbines are visible, according to research by Steve Gibbons. Households are willing to pay £1,000 a year to avoid a large wind farm visible within 2km. His study not...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Local Economic Conditions and the Nature of New Housing Supply

We present a modified open monocentric city model that assumes that land is available for conversion into new housing throughout the city. The model predicts that positive local income shocks (i) increase the city’s shar...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

First-Come First-Served: Identifying the Demand Effect of Immigration Inflows on House Prices

An inflow of immigrants into a region affects house prices in three ways. In the short run, housing demand increases due to the increase in foreign-born population. In the long run, immigrants affect native location deci...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Turning houses into gold: the failure of British planning

Britain’s crisis of housing affordability is nothing to do with foreign speculators, according to Paul Cheshire. Rather, it is a result of decades of misguided planning policies that constrain the supply of land and turn...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Immigrant's access to social housing: perception and reality

Although most UK immigrants are likely to be eligible to apply for social housing, there is no evidence that they have preferential access – if anything the reverse seems to have been the case. But it does seem that ther...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Immigration and the access to social housing in the UK

This paper investigates the impact of immigration on the probability of being in social housing in the UK. In recent years immigrant households are slightly more likely than natives to be in social housing but once one c...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Gone with the Wind: Valuing the Visual Impacts of Wind Turbines through House Prices

This study provides quantitative evidence on the local benefits and costs of wind farm developments in England and Wales, focussing on their visual environmental impacts. In the tradition of studies in environmental, pub...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

House Prices and Rents: Micro Evidence from a Matched Dataset in Central London

Using the proprietary dataset of a real estate agency, I analyse tens of thousands of housing sale and rental transactions in Central London during the 2005-2011 period. I run hedonic regressions on both prices and rents...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Impact of Supply Constraints on House Prices in England

i) This discussion paper, originally published September 2012, is a completely revised version from April 2014. ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Unequal Britain: how real are regional disparities?

Average earnings vary widely across the regions of Britain, a fact that has prompted many decades of policies aimed at reducing regional disparities. But as Henry Overman and Steve Gibbons demonstrate, such variation rev...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... House prices and school quality: evidence from state and private education in Paris

It is now widely understood that the quality of state schools in a neighbourhood has an impact on local house prices. Analysing data for Paris, Gabrielle Fack and Julien Grenet have looked deeper into this link by explor...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Economics Implications of House Price Capitalization: A Synthesis

In this article I argue that the extent to which fiscal variables are capitalized into house prices has important economic implications. I synthesize an emerging literature that explores the conditions under which public...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Real Earnings Disparities in Britain

This report estimates housing-cost-earnings differentials across labour market areas in Britain. We show that quality-adjusted housing costs rise on average, one for one with the skill-adjusted earnings of the average wo...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

When do Better Schools Raise Housing Prices? Evidence from Paris Public and Private Schools

In this paper, we investigate how housing prices react to the quality of education offered by neighbouring public and private schools. The organization of secondary schooling in the city of Paris, which combines residenc...Read more...

CEP election analysis

CEP Election Analysis 2010 - The complete Series, discussing research on some of the key policy battlegrounds of the 2010 General Election

Read more...

CEP election analysis

Urban Renewal and Regional Growth: Muddled Objectives and Mixed Progress

Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

New Housing Supply and the Dilution of Social Capital

This paper examines the role of local housing supply conditions for social capital investment. Using an instrumental variables approach and data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, it is documented that t...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

On the Origins of Land Use Regulations: Theory and Evidence from US Metro Areas

We model residential land use constraints as the outcome of a political economy game between owners of developed and owners of undeveloped land. Land use constraints benefit the former group (via increasing property pric...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

On the Origins of Land Use Regulations: Theory and Evidence from US Metro Areas

We model residential land use constraints as the outcome of a political economy game between owners of developed and owners of undeveloped land. Land use constraints benefit the former group (via increasing property pric...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Policy Paper

Urban Containment, Housing Affordability and Price Stability - Irreconcilable Goals

The planning goals of urban containment and now densification conceive of houses in terms of physical units and of land ‘supply’ as the area allocated for housing by the planning system; estimates of ‘demand’ are driven ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Hot and Cold Seasons in the Housing Market

Every year during the second and thirdquarters (the “hot season”) housing markets in the UK and the US experience systematic above-trend increases in both prices and transactions. During the fourth and first quarters (th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Owners of Developed Land versus Owners of Undeveloped Land: Why Land Use is More Constrained in the Bay Area than in Pittsburgh

We model residential land use constraints as the outcome of a political economy game between owners of developed and owners of undeveloped land. Land use constraints are interpreted as shadow taxes that increase the land...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Incidence of UK Housing Benefit: Evidence from the 1990s Reforms

Housing Benefit (HB) in the UK subsidizes the rent of tenants in both the private and public sectors. Its share in total welfare benefits has risen markedly through time and there is widespread dissatisfaction with it. B...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Neighbourhood Effects in Small Neighbourhoods

This paper uses data on a sample of Australian teenagers to test for neighbourhood effects on school dropout rates. The data allows us to test for neighbourhood effects at two different spatial scales. We find that educa...Read more...