Introductory economics tells us there are three factors of production: land, labour and capital. Unless a student of agricultural economics, land as a factor of production will never be mentioned again. Yet space for some industries is a significant input and that would seem to be true of...

A 2008 paper investigating the Regulatory Tax (RT) on office development in Britain (Cheshire & Hilber, 2008) provided evidence of very tight restrictions on office space going back at least 50 years. It was also argued that the RT measure tended to underestimate the full costs of restrictive...

Britain's land use regulation (planning) system imposes very tight restrictions on the supply of office space so creating substantial rents. An unmeasured part of the costs associated with these restrictions likely comes from compliance costs, one form of which could be rent-seeking activity...

A 2008 paper investigating the Regulatory Tax (RT) on office development in Britain (Cheshire & Hilber, 2008) provided evidence of very tight restrictions on office space going back at least 50 years. It was also argued that the RT measure tended to underestimate the full costs of restrictive...

A quarter of London's skyscrapers are designed by architects who have already won a lifetime achievement award and whose work thus has the imprimatur of 'iconic design'; this compares with just 3% in Chicago. According to research by Paul Cheshire and Gerard Dericks, employing such 'trophy...

Planning is about other things as well, but it is fundamentally an economic activity. It allocates a scarce resource but independently of prices or any market information. In analysing the effects this allocative mechanism has on housing supply (or, indeed, the supply of buildings for any given...

Office space in Britain is the most expensive in the world and regulatory constraints are the obvious explanation. We estimate the ‘regulatory tax’ for 14 British office locations from 1961 to 2005. These are orders of magnitude greater than estimates for Manhattan condominiums or office...

Few studies conceive of land as a productive factor but British land use policies may lower total factor productivity (TFP) in the retailing industry by (i) restricting the total availability of land for retail, thereby increasing space costs (ii) directly limiting store size and (iii)...

The restrictions that planning policies impose on retail development have significantly reduced the productivity of supermarkets, according to Paul Cheshire and colleagues.