Over the last month, INET Oxford Senior Research Fellow Professor John Muellbauer has presented his work at three events.

On 5th November Prof Muellbauer gave the keynote on ”Housing, Monetary Transmission and the Financial Accelerator: the Importance of Institutional Differences” for the National Bank of Poland NBP-SGH Warsaw School of Economics conference “Recent trends in the real estate market and its analysis”. This online conference was to discuss current issues in the field of real estate analysis from the central bank’s point of view.

The topics covered during the conference included:

- Real estate finance and its impact on financial stability;
- Modelling of real estate cycles (demand and supply), with the focus on regional markets and the feedback between real estate construction and economic growth;
- The development of property prices, their modelling and analysis;
- A new approach to real estate analysis in light of the Covid pandemic (i.e. urban economics and regional studies, spatial analysis, sociological and behavioural aspects in the real estate decision-making process, filtration, the ripple effect, gentrification, etc.).

This was followed by the 17th Annual Meeting of the OECD Network on Fiscal Relations Across Levels of Government on 22-23 November, where Prof Muellbauer gave a keynote on “Housing Policy and Fiscal Tools”. The main theme of the talk was the reform of property taxation to improve efficiency, equity, housing affordability, financial stability and help deal with climate change, while fending off resistance from vested interests.

On 2 December 2021, Prof Muellbauer took part in a panel organised by the Oxford Civic Society on the potential for Land Value Capture (LVC) to help fund infrastructure costs and increase the supply of affordable housing in the UK. The aim of LVC is to capture for society a larger share of the uplift in land values brought about by the granting of planning permission or by public infrastructure investment. The meeting concluded that LVC was an excellent principle and that reform of Section 14 of the 1961 Land Compensation Act was an essential first step to increase the options for LVC. That Act included the ’hope value’ of land given planning permission in compensation paid to landowners, rather than the pre-permission value, giving landowners far too high a share of the gain.