Evaluating the effects of planning policies on the retail sector: or do town centre first policies deliver the goods?

Paul Cheshire, Christian Hilber and Ioannis Kaplanis ()

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Few studies conceive of land as a productive factor but British land use policies may lower total factor productivity (TFP) in the retailing industry by (i) restricting the total availability of land for retail, thereby increasing space costs (ii) directly limiting store size and (iii) concentrating retail development on specific central locations. We use unique store-specific data to estimate the impact of space on retail productivity and the specific effects of planning restrictiveness and micromanagement of store locations. We use the quasi natural experiment generated by the variation in planning policies between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to isolate the impact of town centre first policies. We find that TFP rises with store size and that planning policy directly reduces productivity both by reducing store sizes and forcing retail onto less productive sites. Our results, while they strictly only apply to the supermarket group whose data we analyse, are likely to be representative of supermarkets in general and suggest that since the late 1980s planning policies have imposed a loss of TFP of at least 20%.

Keywords: land use regulation; regulatory costs; firm productivity; retail (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D2 L51 L81 R32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2011-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/31757/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Evaluating the Effects of Planning Policies on the Retail Sector: Or do Town Centre First Policies Deliver the Goods? (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:31757

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().