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The financial and Eurozone crises represented the culmination of approximately forty years of neoliberal economic policies. The financialised economic environment facilitated an unprecedented flow of capital and an unparalleled accumulation of private debt that would ultimately and, predictably, prove unsustainable. At the heart of that economic paradigm was the flawed understanding of the nature and operation of money and its interaction with markets and governments. This thesis is concerned with the manner in which the law facilitated that monetary conception. The legal historical analysis undertaken identifies the key components and theoretical foundations traditionally associated with the doctrine of monetary sovereignty and notes the cycle of monetary abuse associated with the production of currency that leads inevitably to economic instability. Moreover, the reconfiguration of public finances in Britain, in the seventeenth century, paved the way for the development of financial markets during a period of intense legal activism. The establishment of a political norm was established that would prioritise the property rights of government creditors, based on a legal conception of the naturalisation of markets, placing the interests of financial elites beyond the reach of the state insulating them from democratic challenge. Despite the brief abandonment of this form laissez-faire capitalism after 1945, it re-emerged in a more extreme form within the neoliberal paradigm. Those re-emergent values were incorporated into European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The legal architecture of the single currency, based on a flawed legal conception of money, severed the link, traditionally found at the national level, between the authority to raise revenue through fiscal authority and the issuance of currency by monetary authorities. Nonetheless, the architects of EMU displayed an unshakeable belief in the efficiency of markets and were convinced that the emphasis on budgetary restraint and price stability would ensure success. In their deference to the prevailing economic orthodoxy, political and institutional actors did not pay sufficient attention to the growing imbalances between Member States and the accumulation of unsustainable levels of private debt. With the onset of the Eurozone crisis, the cause was misleadingly attributed to the fiscal profligacy of peripheral Member States. That narrative provided the justification for the introduction of legal measures that would ensure fiscal consolidation. Those measures merely upheld a set of contestable political and economic interests which represented the abandonment of the normative disciplinary function that the law should have in balancing the interests of the market and the society in which it functions. In turn, the CJEU acquiesced to the political decisions taken by the executive in order to maintain the existing order rather than challenge the validity of those decisions. In that deference, the Court employed a considerable degree of interpretative latitude in which the teleological was prioritised over the literal that weakened the constraints on policymakers and provided the justification for the discretionary allocation of losses that were borne by EU citizens. Much of the analysis of the Eurozone crisis has understandably been dominated by scholars of political economy and/or pure economics. Legal analysis has tended to focus on the constitutional transformation resulting from the legal responses to the crisis. This thesis represents a departure from those approaches. The use of an historical methodology provides a different perspective when compared to the current literature which tends to be ahistorical in nature. The longitudinal view that it provides, regarding the development of the law in monetary matters, shows that the Eurozone crisis was not an atypical event but a continuation of a cycle that occurs when policy makers revert to a form of laissez-faire capitalism designed to constrain the state with the disciplinarian nature of liberalised financial markets.

There is growing international interest in the impact of regulatory controls on the supply of housing. Most research focuses on the supply impacts of prescribed limits on land use but housing supply may also be affected by the process of planning monitoring and approval but this is hard to measure in detail. The UK has a particularly restrictive planning regime and a detailed and uncertain process of development control linked to it, but does offer the opportunity of detailed site-based investigation of planning delay. This paper presents the findings of empirical research on the time taken to gain planning permission for selected recent major housing projects in southern England. The scale of delay found was far greater than is indicated by average official data measuring the extent to which local authorities meet planning delay targets. Hedonic modelling indicated that there is considerable variation in the time it takes local authorities to process planning applications. Housing association developments are processed more quickly than those of large developers and small sites appear to be particularly time-intensive. These results suggest that delays in development control may be a significant contributory factor to the low responsiveness of UK housing supply to upturns in market activity.

This paper sets out to examine why the modern housebuilding industry is organised in the ways it is and to identify some implications for the wider operation of housing markets. It concentrates on advanced economies and the impacts of market conditions, regulatory constraints, production characteristics, institutional structures and land supply. Widespread differences occur across countries in the ways in which housebuilding is institutionally structured. It is argued that these differences are generally explicable in economic terms and that regulatory practices determine much of the variation.

In a recent paper in this journal, Simon Guy and John Henneberry (2000) proposed an institutional approach to property markets that emphasises exceptional behaviour on the part of particular market agents. Using this cultural approach, they claimed to have evidence that London-based property investors deliberately underinvest in British property outside southern England. This paper criticises their dismissal of pre-existing economic and institutional property market analysis and questions the validity of their empirical conclusions.

This paper surveys approaches to the study of institutions, as used in recent commercial property research in Britain. Institutional analysis can be approached from mainstream economics, power, structure-agency and structures of provision methodologies. Each is elaborated and evaluated. Important differences arise between them, which are related primarily to issues of theory and method rather than over whether institutions matter. Any particular piece of analysis has to make assumptions, and here it is true that many economic models have only limited, stylised institutional behaviour. Those that wish for more institutional input, however, have to demonstrate the greater explanatory power of doing so.