Office space in Britain is the most expensive in the world and regulatory constraints are the obvious explanation. We estimate the ‘regulatory tax’ for 14 British office locations from 1961 to 2005. These are orders of magnitude greater than estimates for Manhattan condominiums or office space in continental Europe. Exploiting the panel data, we provide strong support for our hypothesis that the regulatory tax varies according to whether an area is controlled by business interests or residents. Our results imply that the cost of the 1990 change converting commercial property taxes from a local to a national basis – transparently removing any fiscal incentive to permit local development – exceeded any plausible rise in local property taxes.
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Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number
5435.
Find related papers by JEL classification: H3 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation J6 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies R52 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - Regional Government Analysis - - - Land Use and Other Regulations
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Joseph Gyourko & Christopher Mayer & Todd Sinai, 2006.
"Superstar Cities,"
NBER Working Papers
12355, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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