Brexit and the location of migrants

Posted by Felipe Carozzi, SERC & LSE The results of the recent vote to leave the EU have come with a plethora of cross-sectional and spatial analyses, provided by the different British media outlets and their data journalists since Friday morning. We have learned about the generational profile of voters, the poor results of the stay campaign on traditional labour strongholds, the wide difference between results in large cities and small towns. While it is often hard to give a clear interpretation to these correlations, it is natural that we build our narratives and explanations of what happened on Friday with these elements

Credit constraints and the composition of housing sales. Farewell to first-time buyers?

During the housing bust of 2008-2009, housing prices and transaction volumes fell across the United Kingdom. Although the drop in prices was similar across housing types, transaction volumes fell more for units at the lower end of the market. I document this fact and provide panel and instrumental variable estimates showing its link with tightening credit conditions in England and Wales during 2008. I then use an overlapping-generation framework to relate the change in the composition of sales with the reduction in loan-to-value ratios by British banks and to derive additional predictions. As down-payment requirements increase, young households with scarce financial resources are priced out by older owners who retain their previous houses as rental properties when trading up. Recent changes in aggregate housing tenure, disaggregated changes in renting, and sales in areas with different age compositions, are consistent with these predictions. The results presented here show how the composition of sales changes over the housing cycle and may inform ongoing policy discussions about reduced access to home-ownership by the young

Sending the pork home: birth town bias in transfers to Italian municipalities

We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we find that municipal governments of legislators' birth towns receive larger transfers per capita. Exploiting variation in birthplaces induced by parliamentary turnover for estimation, we find that this effect is driven by legislators who were born in a town outside their district of election. As a result, we argue that our findings cannot be a consequence of re-election incentives, the usual motivation for pork-barrel policies in the literature. Rather, politicians may be pursuing other personal motives. In line with this hypothesis, we find that the birth town bias essentially disappears when legislative elections are near. We explore several possible mechanisms behind our results by matching parliamentarians to a detailed dataset on local level administrators

What explains the gender ideology gap?

Research suggests there is a growing ideological gap between young men and women across the world. Felipe Carozzi and Andrés Gago present evidence from Spain that can provide a partial explanation for this phenomenon

Distributive politics inside the city? The political economy of Spain's Plan E

We study the allocation of investment projects by municipal governments across groups of voters using data from a fiscal stimulus program carried out in Spain between 2009 and 2011. This program provided municipalities with a large endowment to spend in public investments and required the geocoding of each individual project. Combining these data with disaggregated election information at the census area level, we study whether politicians use expenditures to target their supporters or to raise turnout. Estimates from regression, matching and RDD methods show no evidence of local governments targeting areas of core support. Instead, investment goes disproportionately to low turnout areas, suggesting that politicians use funds to increase participation. We confirm this hypothesis by showing that, in the following elections, turnout is increased in areas that received more investment. Our results suggest that mobilization can be a force in shaping the allocation of resources across voter groups within cities

Distributive politics inside the city? The political economy of Spain’s Plan E

We study distributive politics inside cities by analysing how local governments allocate investment projects to voters across neighbourhoods. In particular, we ask whether politicians use investment to target their own supporters. To this aim, we use detailed geo-located investment data from Plan E, a large fiscal stimulus program carried out in Spain in 2009–2011. Our main empirical strategy is based on a close-elections regression-discontinuity design. In contrast to previous studies – which use aggregate data at the district or municipal level – we exploit spatial variation in both investment and voter support within municipalities and find no evidence of supporter targeting. Complementary results indicate that voters may be responding to investment by increasing turnout

Spot the difference housing white paper: have we been here before or is this déjà vu?

Given the severity of the housing crisis, the new Housing White Paper is a sad creature. Any policy announcement welcomed by the CPRE almost by definition signals throwing in the towel on the serious reform needed to build more houses. Its aspiration of building “many more houses, of the type people want to live in, in the places they want to live” would be most welcome, if it wasn’t an echo from down the ages. We find an identical aspiration in every government publication since the Barker report of 2004. In 2008 the then National Housing and Planning Advice Unit issued advice on housing supply and argued: “we must increase housing supply, delivering the right number of new homes, of the right type, in the right place and at the right time”. This exact phrase was invented by one of us as a coded way of saying we needed to be willing to build on parts of the Green Belt! If we go back a little further to the Green Paper of 2007 Homes for the future: more affordable, more sustainable, we find a whole section on “How we create places and homes that people want to live in?” Even the number of houses we need to build – 275000 a year – in the current White Paper is drawn for the Barker work. While previous proposals had no mechanism to deliver the ‘right’ homes in the ‘right’ places they did at least have a mechanism – albeit a dirigiste one – to get LAs to allocate more land for housing and set targets for house building. There was also some power to see the targets were more or less met

Sending the pork home: birth town bias in transfers to Italian municipalities

We analyze the distribution of central transfers to municipal governments for the period between the 1993 and the 2005 electoral reforms using a panel of Italian municipalities. We find evidence that being the birth town of a Member of Parliament results in an increase in yearly transfers per capita paid to a municipal administration of roughly 2 percent. Controlling for town fixed effects and concentrating on politicians who are member of economic commissions we confirm that the effect is driven by an active behavior of the politician and not by unobserved town-level characteristics. Using a feature of single member district systems we are able to conclude that these actions are not driven by the desire of being re-elected in Parliament, the standard explanation for pork-barrel spending in the literature. Instead, our results suggest that those extra transfers may be a way for a politician to prepare the ground for a post-congressional career in local government

Dirty density: air quality and the density of American cities

We study whether urban density affects the exposure of city dwellers to ambient air pollution using satellite-derived measures of air quality for the contiguous United States. For identification, we rely on an instrumental variable strategy, which induces exogenous variation in density without affecting pollution directly. For this purpose, we use three variables measuring geological characteristics as instruments for density: earthquake risks, soil drainage capacity and the presence of aquifers. We find a positive and statistically significant pollution-density elasticity of 0.13. We also assess the health implications of our findings and find that doubling density in an average city increases annual mortality costs by as much as $630 per capita. Our results suggest that, despite the common claim that denser cities tend to be more environmentally friendly, air pollution exposure is higher in denser cities. This in turn highlights the possible trade-off between reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and preserving environmental quality within cities

The role of demand in land re-development

Several governments throughout the world apply policies aimed to re-mediate and recover vacant or idle land for other uses. This paper provides estimates of the price sensitivity of redevelopment, a crucial parameter for the success of these policies. My cross-sectional estimates measure how prices affect long-run conversion of unused or underused previously developed land in England. In order to solve the classical problem in the estimation of supply elasticities from market outcomes, I exploit school quality information and school admission boundaries to obtain a demand-shifter that is orthogonal to re-development costs. Estimation is conducted using a boundary discontinuity design based on this instrument. Results show that the probability of re-development is effectively sensitive to housing prices. Estimates indicate that a 1% increase in housing prices leads to a 0.07 percentage point reduction in the fraction of hectares containing brownfield land. Back-of-the envelope calculations using these estimates suggest that a large increase of 21% in prices across locations, or an equivalent subsidy, would be required to eliminate most of these vacant or underused land plots