Current Research

My Current work centers around a new dataset created using OCR to process the British housing returns from 1947 to 2000. These were quarterly statistics published by the British government detailing housebuilding by district in England and Wales. This enables the quarterly reconstruction by tenure of the housing stock in each district over the entire period. This is then merged with disitrct level data on local government elections, house prices and local employment data. I am also working towards joining it with data on local taxation and the refusal rate for planning permissions.

I utilise a novel empirical strategy using the plausibly exogenous variation in housing tenure at a local level using the change in tenure from introduction of the right of social housing tenants to buy their inhabitated property under the “Right to buy scheme”. This can be used to obtain plausibly causal estimates for issues in urban politics such as:

• To what extent homeowners prefer voting for right wing parties relative to social tenants.
• Whether an electorate comprised of homeowners support lower property taxes than one of social tenants.
• If areas with higher homeownership have more restrictive planning laws relative to areas with more social tenants.

Code for the project and details on the shapefiles used can be found in the following repository. If you wish to download a draft paper using a shorter dataset from 1974 to 2001 please use this link.