The socio-legal embeddedness of land markets: landownership structures and regulatory systems in a comparative perspective (France-Luxembourg)

There is a resurgence of interest in how the distribution of propertied assets affects economic and social phenomena, in a context of rising wealth inequalities, and of increasingly flexible fiscal and planning regimes. We propose to extend the study of the political economy of land by undertaking a comparative assessment of the socio-legal embeddedness of land markets in France and Luxembourg. We aim to draw on large-scale land registry, fiscal and social security datasets to analyse how the intersections of historical landownership patterns, regulatory regimes and institutional structures impact a range of outcomes, including housing production, urban and spatial planning. While closely interlinked, France and Luxembourg diverge in a number of underlying conditions: the concentration of landownership, the fiscal treatment of land and the legal treatment of property. In Luxembourg, both an industrial and a financial revolution have occurred over a land surface whose structure of ownership has remained very concentrated since the 19th century. In the absence of sustained intervention by public bodies in land markets, and of low taxes on property and inheritances, access to land has grown to become one of the central political issues in the country. In France however, despite a greater degree of land regulation, local governments have contributed for decades to a progressive privatisation of lands in order to meet housing demand and to capture property taxes. The recent context of austerity urbanism has further reduced their fiscal leeway and has led to the sale of public lands. The socio-legal embeddedness of land markets calls into question the capacity of local governments to regulate land uses. The project would be the first comparative investigation of landownership patterns drawing on large-scale, micro level data sources, with the potential to inform land and fiscal policies at the international scale.