We explore the impact of central government grants on local house prices in England using a panel data set of local authorities (LAs) from 2001 to 2008. Electoral targeting of grants to LAs by the incumbent national government provides an exogenous source of variation in grants that we exploit...

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...

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...

Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidizethe price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a newsurvey of employees in a multinational with a share ownership plan, we find considerablevariation in joining among...

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...

The paper examines the relative importance for industrial location of production linkages and knowledge spillovers, distinguishing between intermediate and non-intermediate goods that are backwards or forwards in nature. A novel approach is used to construct proxies for non-intermediate goods at...

The tax-payer-as-gambler (TAG) model of tax non-compliance is the classic vehicle for providing some simple insights. Under fairly general conditions this model supports the following four propositions: (1) if the rate of return to evasion is positive everyone evades tax; (2) people with higher...

The article considers three major non-Marxist explanations of the modern welfare state: functionalist sociological theories, economic theories of government policy, and pluralist theories of democracy. Each is subjected to a critique and all are found wanting, in that none can satisfactorily...

The article explores the work-life balance policy agenda as it has emerged in post-industrial societies, such as the UK, and it reports on a small-scale study of the experiences and expectations of work-life balance in a low-income inner-London neighbourhood. From the study certain general...