Governments the world over routinely undertake Land Value Capture (LVC) to recover some (or all) of the uplift in land values arising from the right to develop in order to fund infrastructure and public goods. Instruments to exact LVC are diverse but are usually implemented independently. However, since 2011 England has been experimenting with a dual approach to LVC, applying both a tariff-style levy to fund local infrastructure (the Community Infrastructure Levy) and negotiated obligations, used primarily to fund affordable housing (Section 106 agreements). In this article we employ a difference-in-differences (DID) method to identify the interaction of these two instruments available to local planning authorities. We explore the question of whether the Community Infrastructure Levy ‘crowds out’ affordable housing secured through Section 106 planning agreements. In so doing we show that the interaction of these two approaches is heterogeneous across local authorities of different types. This raises questions for understanding the economic geography of development activity and the theory and practice of Land Value Capture.

This paper investigates the contribution of option-implied information for strategic asset allocation for individuals with minimum-variance preferences and portfolios with a variety of assets. We propose a covariance matrix that exploits a mixture of historical and option-implied information. Implied variance measures are proposed for those assets for which option-implied information is available. Historical variance and correlation measures are applied to the remaining assets. The performance of this novel approach for constructing optimal investment portfolios is assessed out-of-sample using statistical and economic measures. An empirical application to a sophisticated portfolio comprised by a combination of equities, fixed income, alternative securities and cash deposits shows that implied variance measures with risk premium correction outperform variance measures constructed from historical data and implied variance without correction. This result is robust across investment portfolios, volatility and portfolio performance metrics, and rebalancing schemes.

The assessment of housing requirement has become an important feature of planning practice in many contexts. The calculative practices by which the level of housing requirement is determined represent important instruments that seek to discipline markets to produce sufficient dwellings to meet the assessed level of requirement. However, behind the purportedly objective assessment of housing requirement are assumptions that pertain to a political imperative to deliver more dwellings. In this article we seek to reveal these political principles by unpacking the ‘Standard Method’ for the assessment of housing requirement which has applied in England since February 2019.