Empirical Political Economy of Housing

在世界各地的许多城市，住房危机已经出现。与此同时，强劲的城市化趋势并没有带来城市住房的增加。在本课题中，我将从城市经济学和政治经济学的交叉点出发，对供给不足的原因进行实证研究。政策制定中的垂直外部性和政治错位是其原因，这是一个令我感兴趣的潜在原因。当一级政府的决策影响到另一级政府行动的效率时，就会产生这种外部性。探讨不同行政级别之间的紧张关系和监管外部性的政治经济学文献主要集中在税收上，并发现由于纵向外部性，社会达到了一个效率低下的税收水平（例如，Keen，1998; Keen & Kotsogiannis，2002; Brulhart & Jametti，2006）。 除了税收，理论分析还探讨了政治家控制中的垂直外部性（Wrede，2002）和税收背景下的环境政策（Boehringer，Rivers & Yonezawa，2016）。我假设不同政府层级之间的利益冲突导致的纵向外部性是政策失败的主要原因。探讨纵向外部性并量化其福利效应的一个潜在背景是英国。同意受保护建筑物翻新的权力（“列名建筑同意”）属于地方议会，拒绝同意翻新或翻新房屋与鼓励翻新的国家能源效率政策相冲突。虽然能效政策通常不区分列入名单的建筑物和其他建筑物，但经济直觉表明，列入名单的建筑物和其他建筑物在能效翻新方面衡量的政策结果不同。因此，我的论文将估计所列的建筑政策对放弃的能源法案节省和可避免的福利成本的温室气体排放的影响。在我的博士学位期间，我想探讨政府层级之间的政治错位作为这种垂直政策外部性的驱动力。

In many cities around the world, housing crises have emerged. Simultaneously, strong trends towards urbanisation have not been matched by increased urban housing. In this project, I am looking to empirically investigate drivers of the lack of supply from a perspective at the intersection of urban and political economy.One potential driver that fascinates me is vertical externalities in policymaking and political misalignment as their cause. Such externalities arise when policymaking on one level of government affects the efficacy of actions of another level of government. Political economy literature exploring tensions and regulatory externalities between different administrative levels primarily focuses on taxation and finds that with vertical externalities, society arrives at an inefficient tax level (e.g., Keen, 1998; Keen & Kotsogiannis, 2002; Brulhart & Jametti, 2006). Beyond taxation, theoretical analyses have explored the presence of vertical externalities in the control of politicians (Wrede, 2002) and environmental policy in the context of taxation (Boehringer, Rivers & Yonezawa, 2016). I hypothesise that vertical externalities resulting from conflicting interests between different government tiers are a central reason for policies to fail in their aims.One potential setting to explore vertical externalities and quantify its welfare effects is in the United Kingdom. The authority to consent to refurbishments of protected buildings ("listed building consent") lies with local councils and refusing consent to refurbish or retrofit houses collides with national energy-efficiency policy incentivising refurbishments. While energy efficiency policies generally do not discriminate between listed and other buildings, economic intuition suggests that the policy outcome measured in energy-efficiency refurbishments differs for listed and other buildings. Hence, my thesis will estimate the effect of the listed building policy on forgone energy bill savings and avoidable welfare costs in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. During my PhD, I want to explore political misalignment between governmental tiers as a driver of such vertical policy externalities.