Eric Crampton • Jul 23, 2015 •
The Very Serious People understand the political constraints under which policy operates. They often overestimate the bindingness of those constraints, but the rest of us underestimate them. Here's Tyler:I think of it this way: the People are Very Serious if they realize that common sense morality must, to a considerable extent, rule politics. At least if voters are … Read More
Paul Walker • Jul 14, 2015 •
With all the xenophobic rubbish we are getting from Labour and bizarre calls for bans on foreign ownership of housing by the likes of the BNZ's Tony Alexander I find myself asking, But what is the actual effect of foreign buyers on the prices of homes?... Read More
Eric Crampton • Jul 14, 2015 •
If Labour is right that a flood of Chinese capital is driving up Auckland house prices, this could wind up being the single biggest wasted opportunity New Zealand has had over the past... well, since I've been here.If Auckland zoning were sane, all of ... Read More
Eric Crampton • Jul 09, 2015 •
I like Bernard Hickey's concluding paragraph in this weekend's column. After explaining how changes in Chinese controls on outbound overseas investment could spark greater interest in Auckland property, he writes:A look across the Tasman suggests the f... Read More
Eric Crampton • Jun 26, 2015 •
Simon Collins at the Herald asked me for comment on a paper alleging racial bias in mortgage lending; his story's now up. The paper is available here. It shows, using ordered logit regression, that people who self-identify as being more easily identified as Maori are less likely to own their own home, correcting for income and a few … Read More
Eric Crampton • Jun 21, 2015 •
I've worried that perhaps Councils haven't fought back against the NIMBYs because they haven't quite enough skin in the game.The basic model in my head has run as follows:Councillors need to be re-elected. High preference intensity local NIMBYs get dis... Read More
Eric Crampton • Apr 30, 2015 •
Metro Mag ran a feature on empty houses in Auckland, pointing a finger at empty houses with overseas owners as a cause of Auckland's skyrocketing housing cost. In Auckland, more than 33,000 houses were registered as unoccupied in the most recent data from 2013. A breakdown shows about a third had residents away. The remaining 22,152 properties are listed … Read More
Eric Crampton • Apr 17, 2015 •
I knew that Mike Reddell's now being free to blog on monetary policy and the RBNZ was going to be good.Here's Reddell's take on the Deputy Governor's statements on housing.We should expect the Reserve Bank to provide in-depth analysis to back its claims around the housing market. But in a 19 page speech, only five paragraphs are devoted to … Read More
Eric Crampton • Mar 31, 2015 •
In the standard spatial urban economics model, the marginal person has to be indifferent between living in different cities. That doesn't mean that all cities have to be identical but rather that, from the perspective of the marginal resident, the down... Read More
Eric Crampton • Jan 27, 2015 •
Yes, the Motu report on the costs of Auckland's urban planning regulations does not include a measure of the benefits. In some cases this will not matter much; in others, it might.Andrew Geddis focuses on building height limits which impose about $18-3... Read More