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 restrictions on the supply of land. Such tighter restrictions lead to higher prices...

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...

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...