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Regulating Housing Vacancies Away? The Paradoxical Effects of Mismatch

Author

Listed:
  • Paul Cheshire
  • Christian A. L. Hilber
  • Hans R. A. Koster
Abstract
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 and, because of the incentives this creates for occupying housing, to lower housing vacancies ('opportunity cost effect'). There is, however, a second effect ignored by planners: more restrictive planning policies impede the matching process in housing markets so leading to higher vacancies ('mismatch effect'). Which of these two forces dominates is an empirical question. This is our focus here. Addressing potential reverse causation and other endogeneity concerns, we use a unique panel data set on land use regulation for 350 Local Authorities in England from 1981 to 2011. Our results show that tighter local planning constraints increase local housing vacancy rates, suggesting that the mismatch effect dominates. A one standard deviation increase in local regulatory restrictiveness causes the average local vacancy rate to increase by about 0.9 percentage points (23 percent). The results are economically meaningful and show that pointing to the existence of vacant houses as a reason for being more restrictive in allocating land for housing is counterproductive.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul Cheshire & Christian A. L. Hilber & Hans R. A. Koster, 2015. "Regulating Housing Vacancies Away? The Paradoxical Effects of Mismatch," SERC Discussion Papers 0181, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:sercdp:0181
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Wheaton, William C, 1990. "Vacancy, Search, and Prices in a Housing Market Matching Model," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(6), pages 1270-1292, December.
    2. Ismir Mulalic & Jos N. Van Ommeren & Ninette Pilegaard, 2014. "Wages and Commuting: Quasi‐natural Experiments' Evidence from Firms that Relocate," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 124(579), pages 1086-1105, September.
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    Cited by:

    1. Hilber, Christian A. L. & Schöni, Olivier, 2016. "Housing policies in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States: lessons learned," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 72818, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Segú, Mariona & Vignolles, Benjamin, 2018. "Taxing Vacant Dwellings: Can fiscal policy reduce vacancy?," MPRA Paper 85508, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Jeffrey P. Cohen & Cletus C. Coughlin & Jonas C. Crews, 2018. "Interregional Migration and Housing Vacancy: Theory and Empirics," Working Papers 2018-007, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, revised 16 Oct 2020.
    4. Bilotkach, Volodymyr & Braakmann, Nils & Gonzalo-Almorox, Eduardo & Wildman, John, 2017. "The effect of house prices on the long-term care market: Evidence from England," MPRA Paper 81987, University Library of Munich, Germany.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Residential vacancy rates; housing supply constraints; land use regulation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • R13 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - General Equilibrium and Welfare Economic Analysis of Regional Economies
    • R38 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location - - - Government Policy

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