Duncan MaclennanUniversity of Glasgow | UofG
Duncan Maclennan
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113
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (113)
This research reviewed Australia’s COVID-19 housing policy responses to better understand their intervention approach, underlying logic, short and long term goals, target groups and level of success.
This report stems from an ongoing research program to investigate and expose the connectivity between housing system outcomes and economic performance. In gauging the views of leading Australian economists and residential property market experts it reveals a strong consensus that governments must pay greater attention to the way that over-expensive...
This report considers evidence about the existence and scale of agglomeration economies, including in Australian cities. It examines whether city size affects productivity, and whether economic productivity, city size and rising housing costs are interdependent.
This report draws on a major review of Australian and international literature about relationships between housing systems and economic performance. It is also informed by the authors' empirical research on the perspectives of Australia's leading economists and housing market experts on housing-economy linkages. The report argues that housing syste...
This report analyses opinions of Australia’s top economists and other senior policy experts on how housing fits into economic and policy narratives in this country. It draws on results of an online survey of that involved 87 participants (47 economists and 40 non-economists). Survey respondents indicated their level of agreement or disagreement wit...
The Commission’s research brief requires an investigation of housing wealth inequalities in Scotland, highlighting the impact these have on the lives of Scottish people, and discussing potential policy responses. This involves answering four research questions:
1. What do we mean by housing wealth?
2. What does housing wealth look like in Scotland...
Executive summary housingevidence.ac.uk Summary The distribution of housing wealth plays an increasingly key role in shaping the distribution of wealth and income. The Scottish housing system has transformed over the last 40 years from a rental majority to almost two Scots in three owning their home. Housing wealth is now increasingly affected by n...
This paper argues that the shift from a top-down coordination of governments’ policies for the economies of cities towards the bottom-up self-organization of cities is not necessarily supported by appropriately competent local economic management capabilities and resources. In Scotland just before the advent of City Deals, various constraints in po...
This international knowledge exchange project explored the conventional housing policy narratives that have dominated government thinking in Australia, Britain and Canada (the ABC countries) over the past 20-30 years. It sought to construct more effective, progressive policy narratives robust enough to thrive within the tough competitive environmen...
Australian governments have looked to AHURI to investigate what would support an affordable housing industry to (a) Generate new affordable housing supply; (b) Facilitate stock modernisation and neighbourhood renewal in former public housing areas under new social landlords; and (c) Improve service quality, enhance social renter mobility and promot...
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century has attracted public, policy and academic attention. Although there is a growing research literature on the formation, distribution, utilization and wider implications of housing wealth there has been little discussion of Piketty’s work in housing studies. This paper outlines and assesses the major contr...
Studies of housing systems lying in the ‘middle ground’ between state and market are subject to three important shortcomings. First, the widely used Esping-Andersen (EA) approach assesses only a subset of the key housing outcomes and may be less helpful for describing changes in housing policy regimes. Second, there is too much emphasis on tenure t...
This is a scoping study with the immediate aim of reviewing links between housing and productivity. It uses scans of existing literature, assessments of local strategies for planning, and interviews with key practitioners involved in metropolitan and local economic development strategies. Published research and practitioners' experiences are used t...
Purpose
– This paper aims to use Markov switching vector auto regression (MSVAR) methods to examine UK house price cycles in UK regions at NUTS1 level. There is extensive literature on UK regional house price dynamics, yet empirical work focusing on the duration and magnitude of regional housing cycles has received little attention. The research fi...
Reuschke D. and Maclennan D. Housing assets and small business investment: exploring links for theory and policy, Regional Studies. Housing market activity and firm formation are both positively correlated with the business cycle, and the levels of mortgage lending to business owners and funding of small firms have fallen in the UK since 2008. This...
In this article we consider whether the city policy frameworks that are currently emerging in England and Scotland, under the influence of devolution and localism, are likely to result in a locally effective yet nationally coherent set of economic outcomes or generate a disorderly pattern of local autonomies based on a series of ad hoc, local deals...
A major issue for those interested in developing policy from research is that the vast majority of the academic contributions to the neighbourhood effects debates have come from work conducted in the United States of America. More often than not, the case studies have evolved from the Chicago school. In contrast policy makers are increasingly requi...
This edited volume critically examines the link between area based policies, neighbourhood based problems, and neighbourhood effects: the idea that living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods has a negative effect on residents life chances over and above the effect of their individual characteristics. Over the last few decades, Western governments have...
In this study, we examine the idea of localism in the context of housing policy and as mediated by the experience of devolution in England and Scotland. After considering arguments for adopting localism in principle, we examine the meaning and limitations of the concept when account is taken of the real nature of housing systems. This forms the bas...
This edited volume critically examines the link between area based policies, neighbourhood based problems, and neighbourhood effects: the idea that living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods has a negative effect on residents’ life chances over and above the effect of their individual characteristics. Over the last few decades, Western governments have...
A distinctive strand of economic analysis emerged in Austria after the 1870s. It grew out of the marginal revolution in economics but differed in stressing the subjective and complex behaviours that underpinned not just demand but also supply relationships. Individuals, the central concern of the Austrian School, face major challenges of discoverin...
Time is of the essence in housing system analysis. Charting and understanding the drivers and consequences of housing outcomes over time, housing history, is important in understanding how ideas about and policies for housing have evolved. However, the need to consider time in housing processes runs deeper. Much research in the social sciences is s...
Research into the spatial structure and functioning of local housing markets typically focuses on market outcomes, particularly house price changes and household movement patterns. Explanatory models are usually based upon a standard neoclassical analysis of the housing market. That approach de-emphasises the importance of imperfect information, re...
Non-random sorting of residents into neighbourhoods provides neighbourhood effects researchers with a major challenge: The neighbourhoods which people ‘choose’ reflect their incomes, and as a result neighbourhood characteristics are endogenous, causing bias in models of neighbourhood effects. So understanding neighbourhood choice and neighbourhood...
Over the last 25 years a vast body of literature has been published on neighbourhood effects: the idea that living in more deprived neighbourhoods has a negative effect on residents’ life chances over and above the effect of their individual characteristics. The volume of work not only reflects academic and policy interest in this topic, but also t...
Over the last 25 years a vast body of literature has been published investigating neighbourhood effects: the idea that neighbourhood
characteristics can have a significant effect on residents’ life chances over and above the effect of their individual characteristics.
There is little doubt that neighbourhood effects exist, but we know little about...
This paper explores the implications of observed national housing sector experiences across the advanced economies before,
through and out of the ‘Great Financial Crash’ (GFC) of 2008. The evidence suggests that over-aggregative explanation of these
experiences and their broader economic consequences is somewhat misleading; empirical and theoretica...
The most important development determining current housing-market and housing policies worldwide is the credit crunch. When the problems exploded on US mortgage markets, a banking crisis started in the US and later in other parts of the world. From a scientific viewpoint there is insufficient knowledge about the relation between an economic crisis...
Progress in modeling the relationships between the business cycle, home prices, and private residential investment has been substantial. This chapter poses challenges to the emerging conventional wisdom and suggests additional research and policy questions for the future. It makes an attempt to link housing system perspectives to the macroeconomic...
Over the last decade, the OECD economies, the affluent Asian economies and the transition states have mostly experienced significant upswings in house prices. Upswings have ended with the emergence of the credit crunch since 2007. Dominant policy concerns related to housing have been affordability, in the upswing, and instability, in the downswing....
2 This paper is the first part of a presentation made to the Centre for Housing Research Aotearoa New Zealand (CHRANZ) in Auckland in November 2007 and it sets out the major impacts of globalisation on housing markets and policy possibilities. A second paper, Housing, Economic Change and the Governance of Metropolitan Areas, then considers how larg...
Housing rehabilitation: theory and policy but no evidence
The character and quality of the housing stock within an urban area has a direct bearing on the well-being of not only residents but of surrounding neighbours and even commuters, visitors and tourists. Changing the quality of the housing stock within a neighbourhood not only alters the physi...
This paper outlines how the scale, techniques and purpose of neighbourhood renewal policies in the UK have evolved. Until the last decade regeneration was largely perceived as a re-distributive policy to alleviate the symptoms of decline processes in inner-city neighbourhoods. Current approaches are based on more complex notions both of the geograp...
During the 1990s, as social housing throughout Europe experienced budget cuts, the British response involved adopting a more European approach. A market for social housing finance has been successfully created. Major contrasts with Europe remain, particularly the dominance of municipal housing. Continuing fiscal stringency, system difficulties and...
Most housing models, and most policy analysis, hinge on explicit or implicit estimates of the price elasticity of supply of housing: does the market respond to demand side shocks with more supply or higher prices? Building on a model originally developed by Steve Mayo, we estimate the price elasticity of supply of housing from new construction sepa...
Developments in housing policy and practice have been marked by strong ideological stances and a persistent unwillingness to clarify ends and means, so that key policy questions remain unresolved. Evidence can, and does, impact on policy, but only under certain conditions; for example, if it relates to a specific policy question, is restricted to t...
Private rental housing has had a mixed experience of growth and decline across the advanced economies over the postwar period.
Patterns of the tenuer’s significance have been driven by policy rather than economic growth and public housing provision,
home-ownership subsidies and inflation have been as significant as rent controls. Sectors now compri...
The relation between public policy and the private rented sector is usually unclear. The private rented sector often suffers from public policy, although private landlords mostly enjoy fiscal advantages as well. In many European countries, private renting housing has been losing ground. Nevertheless, private rented housing fulfils a number of usefu...
Despite convergence pressures, differences in housing and financial market institutions across the 15 member states of the European Union are still enormous. This paper argues that they have profound effects on the responsiveness of output and inflation in the different countries to changes in short-term interest rates, as well as to asset-market s...
There is likely to be considerable cross- and within-region variation in housing wealth. This paper examines how housing wealth has varied in the United Kingdom over the boom and bust period of 1983-93. It also analyzes, for the period 1989-93, the relationship between housing wealth, household spending and labor market moves for individual househo...
Despite convergence pressures, differences in housing and financial market institutions across the 15 member states of the European Union are still enormous. This paper argues that they have profound effects on the responsiveness of output and inflation in the different countries to changes in short-term interest rates, as well as to asset-market s...
The merits of market and non‐market, or social, housing provision are often debated on the basis of entrenched conceptions of market and bureaucratic systems. From an economic perspective, this paper challenges the validity of traditional ‘polar’ arguments in support of state or market provision, concluding that there is no ex‐ante case favouring o...
This paper examines the 'global competition' aspects of housing policies and the implications of an emerging 'flexible' economic order for housing markets in advanced economies. An overview is given of movements in international patterns of growth and trade, including a review of the effects on labour and housing markets of increased competition fr...
This paper examines the notions of market and sub-market in the context of housing. It first proposes specific definitions and then clarifies why the general characteristics of housing are likely to generate sub-markets and why these will tend to exhibit disequilibrium of different forms and durations. These sub-markets may be sectoral or spatial,...
Drawing from the materials prepared in the course of the technical assistance project, this paper discusses the importance of establishing 'free' market rents in Eastern Europe; why appropriate rent schemes matter in the operation of public housing (for examples, why the 'opinions' of a few municipal officials are inadequate to develop efficient an...
Demographic and economic changes are likely to be favorable to the U.K. as 2001 approaches. Population pressures are easing, and the economy is recovering sharply. But constraints on public spending will remain. The U.K. housing system is costly and appears to boost prices more than output, reinforcing macroeconomic instabilities. Its key limitatio...
In this paper we develop arguments to suggest that regional differences in housing markets and household resources, and in tenure, are important explanations of the pattern of the UK housing system. We use a new microsurvey of six urban housing systems to demonstrate how they differ and why such differences can be important.
European integration will have several effects on national housing policies. The major responsibility for policy formulation and policy implementation in housing will remain with national and local governments. Nevertheless, the Maastricht Treaty will have important implications for housing through several channels: factor mobility, competition pol...
Feasibility study for the Commission of the European Communities, Directorate-Genera! for Employment, Industrial Relations and Social Affairs
The development of North Sea oil transformed the Aberdeen economy and created a rare example of recent, focused, and rapid urban growth in the United Kingdom. First, a comparative static view of housing-market adjustments induced by just such an exogenous shock is set out. This leads on to a consideration of the dynamics of urban change through the...
This analysis of British housing policy takes the City of Glasgow as its medium of exposition. Glasgow has had a longstanding notoriety for its housing conditions. More recently the city has gained a reputation for innovative rehabilitation programs. With a current population of just under three-quarters of a million people, Glasgow forms the core...
Redlining in the housing market occurs when building societies explicitly delineate in some way sections of cities where they will not usually grant mortgages. This paper considers redlining as part of the broader question of credit rationing, and derives a number of alternative possible explanations of the spatial distribution of mortgage finance....
Despite the widely acknowledged importance of house prices and the rate of house price appreciation within the urban system there has been relatively little empirical work to explore intra‐urban differentials in these factors. This has been due in some part to the lack of any longitudinal microdata on house prices. This paper uses a unique database...
Shows, in Glasgow since the middle 1970s, the way in which a well-resourced public-sector programme of rehabilitation of housing and the environment has provided the base of a new confidence on which private-sector investment has expanded within the inner city. -from Editor Centre for Housing Studies, Univ of Glasgow, UK.
The focus of this paper is the influence of North Sea oil development on the owner occupied housing market of Aberdeen sub‐region in the 1970s and the consequent response by private housebuilders. It can also be regarded as the major modern British example of how an ‘exogenous’ economic shock to a region can revolutionize the pattern of housing dev...
The rehabilitation of Britain’s older housing became an increasingly important activity throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The British rehabilitation programme, broadly defined, now contains a range of activities and instruments, including improvement and repair grants for private sector use, environmental improvement grants, direct local authority in...
The paper presents by using regionally disaggregated data for the British Economic Planning Regions some questions on the usefulness of current macro-oriented approaches to the modelling of house price inflation. The paper indicates that such models should be restricted in their use to national levels. It argues that a more disaggregated approach t...
The various attempts that have been made to analyse and develop atheory of spatial choice are reviewed and the weaknesses of these attempts highlighted. In particular the use of revealed-preference theory is criticised on the grounds that mere modification of aspatial economic theories to take account of the spatial dimension may reduce the origina...
Projects
Projects (3)
The UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) is a consortium of 14 institutions led by the University of Glasgow.
The centre, which was established in August 2017, is a multidisciplinary partnership between academia, housing policy and practice. Over the course of the five-year programme, CaCHE researchers will produce evidence and new research which will contribute to tackling the UK’s housing problems at a national, devolved, regional, and local level.
CaCHE is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Arts and Humanities Research Council and Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
https://housingevidence.ac.uk/
This research focuses on Australia’s small but growing affordable housing industry, and its capacity to restructure the social housing system to better deliver housing for low-moderate income households.
The key questions for the Inquiry are:
1. What can be learned about the capacity of Australia’s affordable housing industry from recent transfers from the public housing sector?
2. What can be learned from overseas experience of social housing restructuring and affordable housing industry development?
3. How can Australian governments and industry players most effectively grow capacity in the affordable housing industry?
Underpinned by four supporting research projects, the study will assist governments in fostering the additional capacity needed to facilitate further transitioning of public housing into not for profit agency control.