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 hundred years and derive implied discount rates. For our empirical...

In this paper I study unit-level data on house prices and rents in Central London. I document the existence of systematic differences in price-rent ratios across property types within the same urban area: bigger properties and properties located in more expensive neighborhoods have higher...

This paper analyzes the duration of house price upturns and downturns in the last 40years for 19 OECD countries. Both upturns and downturns display duration dependence: they are more likely to end as their duration increases. Downturns display also lagged duration dependence: they are less...

Most housing transactions in London involve trading long leases of varying lengths. We exploit this feature to estimate the time value of housing --- the relationship between the value of a property and the length of time it will be owned for --- over the range 1-99 years. To do so, we compile a...

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...

We estimate the effect of the UK Stamp Duty Land Tax on household mobility using micro data. The UK (until 2014) provided an ideal setting to explore the impact of housing transfer taxes on mobility decisions. This is partly because the stamp duty liability is quite substantial, at least for...

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...