Paul Cheshire

On the Price of Land and the Value of Amenities

A house represents not only a bundle of structural characteristics but also a set of location specific characteristics. Adding locational coordinates and site area to other house characteristics makes it possible to estimate a land rent surface as well as the hedonic prices attached to local patterns of land use and other neighborhood characteristics. One can then estimate how the value of such location-specific characteristics are capitalized into land prices. This analysis, illustrated with estimates based on data from two British towns, has a number of wider implications. It generates a more parsimonious method of estimating amenity values. It also reveals likely systematic biases produced by conventional hedonic studies which exclude land and location. Finally, it clarifies the conceptual definition of land and suggests that monocentric models can person,n well despite recent criticism. Copyright 1995 by The London School of Economics and Political Science.

A new phase of urban development in Western Europe? The evidence for the 1980s.

This is the first report of patterns of population change during the 1980s in the major urban regions of the European Union (of 12), using the results of the 1990 census round (or registration data where no census was taken). There is evidence of a substantial breakup of the previous regular pattern of decentralisation, which had been spreading from northern to southern European cities and from the largest to the medium-sized cities. During the 1980s there was a significant degree of recentralisation in many northern European cities, with nearly half of all core cities gaining population. The evidence presented here is consistent with arguments advanced in an earlier paper which suggested that such a change of patterns should be anticipated. There does not appear to be a complete reversal of previous patterns, however. Some urban regions continue to decentralise and decline; others are declining but experiencing relative recentralisation. The pattern is that there is now a greater variation in patterns. Cities which are experiencing the most relative recentralisation show that they are not a random group. They have characteristics consistent with the causal analysis which is presented. The plausibility of general, rather than particularistic explanations, is made greater by the very similar change of trends recently reported for US cities.

The welfare economics of land use planning

This paper presents an empirical methodology for the evaluation of the benefits and costs of land use planning. The technique is applied in the context of the Town and Country Planning System of the UK, and examines the gross and net benefits of land use regulation and their distribution across income groups. The results show that the welfare and distributional impacts can be large.

Estimating the Demand for Housing, Land, and Neighbourhood Characteristics

This paper provides estimates of the structure of demand for individual housing and neighborhood characteristics and for land in two British cities. The authors estimate a hedonic price function, and from this obtain the implicit prices of house attributes. These prices are used to estimate a demand system for each city. These perform well, and enable them to calculate price and income elasticities for each of the nondichotomous characteristics and for land. To counteract criticisms of demand estimates derived within the hedonic framework a method is developed for selecting an appropriate set of instrumental variables. Estimates derived from this method, however, differ only slightly from those obtained using the conventional techniques. Several features of these estimates provide insights into the unusual characteristics of the British housing market, the effects of constraints imposed by land use planning, and the effects of changing income distribution on the structure of demand. Copyright 1998 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Endogenous Processes in European Regional Growth: Convergence and Policy

The traditional empirical approaches to the analysis of economic growth,cross-section and panel data regressions are substantially uninformative withrespect to the issue of convergence. Whether national or regional economies appear to converge in terms of per capita income or productivity levels (the so-called b-convergence) critically depends on the way in which the empirical model is specified. Traditional specifications witness a disproportionate presence of proxies for forces leading towards divergence among the conditioning variables. It is therefore hardly surprising that these analyses find a positive and statistically significant value for the estimate of the speed of convergence. Copyright 2000 Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky.

Resurgent Cities, Urban Myths and Policy Hubris: What We Need to Know

1. Structure and Aims of this Special IssueThis Special Issue has grown out of an inter-national Symposium on Resurgent Citiesheld in London in April 2004. More than40 papers were given on a range of issuesrelated to that unifying theme. We are nottrying to represent the sweep of these contri-butions here. It would not be possible, givenhow rich the available material was. Here,we have two, more narrowly focused objec-tives. The first is to put the idea of ‘resurgentcities’ on the research agenda. What does thisphrase really mean? What plausible hypo-theses underlie the idea that resurgence islikely or feasible now? How does it relate tothe facts of cities in OECD and other moredeveloped countries? Our second objective isto take the notion of resurgence as anexample of the need for a research agenda todevelop serious, fundamental, evidence-based research on urban issues beforerushing to judgement or formulating urbanpolicies on the basis of some new conven-tional wisdom(s). In this context, it is hopedthat this Special Issue forms something of amanifesto.2. Resurgence and the Functions of CitiesThe symposium was not predicated on theassumption that urban resurgence was univer-sal or even existed, but that it was a processfor which there was some current evidenceand—given the importance of cities insocial, economic and political terms—wasthereforeasubjectforseriousenquiry.Contri-butions showed that city resurgence was ahard concept to define precisely and theevidence suggested that, although happeningin some urban contexts, it was both far fromuniversal, even uncommon, and—moresignificantly—its causes were not clearlyunderstood. This sceptical caution is reflectedin the contributions of Glaeser and Gottlieb,Markusen and Schrock, Musterd, andStorper and Manville as well as Beauregard(2004). Indeed, Glaeser and Gottlieb’sreading of the evidence is much more suppor-tive of resurgence—at least in the US—beingmore relative than absolute.Emphasising the difficulty of definingexactly what is meant by urban resurgence,the contributors to this Special Issue all havesomewhat different versions, although allUrban Studies, Vol. 43, No. 8, 1231–1246, July 2006

Urban Economic Growth in Europe: Testing Theory and Policy Prescriptions:

A quite robust model of differential growth rates of per capita income in the major functional urban regions of the European Union is presented and tested for the 1980s. The results underline the important role of purely spatial economic processes in differential regional growth and suggest that the pattern of European urbanisation tends itself to generate systematic divergence of mean per capita incomes between neighbouring city-regions, even though the mechanism generating this divergence of mean incomes is not inconsistent with converging incomes for comparable individuals. In addition, the evidence is supportive of a spatial adaptation of Romers endogenous technical progress model. The model is formulated in a way which tests policy concerns. In general, the results are supportive of European regional policy although the systematic spatial effects of European integration seem to be fading and extending outwards to near-peripheral urban regions.

Cities in Competition: Articulating the Gains from Integration

Reviews the interaction of competition between cities and the process of European integration. Spatial impact of European integration; Impact of territorial competition; Implications of interaction; Conclusions.

Trends in sizes and structures of urban areas

This chapter reviews the literature dealing with systems of cities and the patterns of development within such systems. It starts with the longstanding question of the distribution of city sizes, both in relation to how this distribution can be described and, given the form that it takes, how that form can be explained. Such explanations frequently invoke various sorts of agglomeration economies and so some of the literature relating to these is included here. The chapter then surveys the literature that examines patterns of development within urban systems, and then work at a more disaggregated level on suburbanisation. The chapter concludes with a summary of research into recent patterns of urbanisation, including relative recentralisation.

Inner Areas as Spatial Labour Markets: a Critique of the Inner Area Studies

After briefly sketching a suitable analytical framework for local labour markets the paper applies the analysis to the problems identified as peculiar to the inner city. It concludes that inner city labour market problems are not peculiar to such areas but result from the economics of urban structure compounded by general labour market deterioration.