科学研究

Paul Cheshire is Professor Emeritus of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics and Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences. His research has focused on urban growth in Europe, urban land and housing markets and the economic effects of land use planning. He is the author/editor of 12 books and more than a 150 journal articles. He has acted as consultant to governments and international organisations: these include the World Bank, The UN, The OECD, The European Commission and the government of New Zealand as well as several UK government departments. He was an advisor to both Barker Reviews of planning and a Board member of the National Housing and Planning Advisory Unit. Most recently he was specialist advisor to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Built Environment for its enquiry into how to meet the demand for housing. He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Weimer School of Advanced Studies in Real Estate and Land Economics. He won the Royal Economic Society’s Best Paper prize for 2004, the European Real Estate Society’s Best Paper Prize in 2007 and the EIB-ERSA Lifetime Achievement Prize in 2009. He was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for services to economics and housing in 2017.

Urban economics provides powerful evidence of the importance of agglomeration economies: productive agents are, all else equal, more productive in larger cities and in denser clusters. More recent research provides evidence of ‘vertical’ agglomeration economies: working in taller buildings leads to greater individual productivity (Koster et al, 2014; Liu et al., 2018). Britain combines idiosyncratic but tight restrictions on building heights and the supply of office space (Cheshire and Hilber, 2008) with a discretionary planning system. The tight restrictions on the supply of office space create substantial economic rents but since decisions on development proposals are politically administered, they are gameable, inducing rent-seeking activity. We are able to quantify the impact of this and find that ‘trophy architects’ (TAs) – prior winners of a lifetime achievement award – obtain more space on a given site apparently by signalling iconic design. Analysis of 2,039 office buildings transactions in London shows TAs build 14 stories taller, increasing a representative site value by 152 percent. We argue this premium is compensation for the extra costs, risks and delays of using a TA to game the planning system; and therefore an indirect measure of deadweight rent-seeking losses. Nevertheless the effect of these restrictions is also to restrict agglomeration economies in Britain’s largest cities.