British planning is among the most restrictive in the world and has been restrictive for longer than elsewhere. Restrictive regulation substantially increases the costs of office space and, especially in London, increases the house prices. Partly in response to the crisis in housing supply an automatic right to convert offices to residential use was introduced in 2013. Some major office locations in central London and Manchester were excluded from this relaxation. We exploit the resulting boundary discontinuities to estimate the impact on prices of the new right to convert offices to housing. Using a panel data set of some 2,000 office transactions between 2009 and 2016, we find a significant increase in the price of offices eligible for this automatic conversion: our central estimate is a premium of 50%. This result demonstrates that London's restrictions on the supply of housing were substantially more severe than those on offices–already estimated to have been tighter than anywhere else in Europe. This article contributes to the small literature analyzing the restrictive effect of regulation on offices and is, as far as we are aware, the first analyzing regulatory restriction on offices relative to housing.

中文翻译：

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办公室稀缺但住房更稀缺：估计伦敦办公室转换的溢价

英国的规划是世界上限制最严格的国家之一，并且限制的时间比其他地方要长。限制性监管大大增加了办公空间的成本，特别是在伦敦，房价上涨。部分为了应对住房供应危机，2013 年引入了将办公室转换为住宅用途的自动权利。伦敦市中心和曼彻斯特的一些主要办公地点被排除在这种放松之外。我们利用由此产生的边界不连续性来估计将办公室改建为住房的新权利对价格的影响。使用 2009 年至 2016 年间约 2,000 笔办公室交易的面板数据集，我们发现符合自动转换条件的办公室价格显着上涨：我们的中心估计是溢价 50%。这一结果表明，伦敦' 对住房供应的限制比对办公室的限制要严格得多——据估计，这已经比欧洲其他任何地方都要严格。本文有助于分析办公室监管限制效应的小型文献，据我们所知，本文是第一篇分析办公室与住房相关的监管限制。