Professor Philip Lane:

They definitely did have a role to play, descriptively. I do not know whether they had a dominant role to play. At a micro level, there is the question of why the property boom was more intense in some regions and districts than others. In other words, in terms of the geography of where investment took place, the incentives, I am sure, had a bigger effect in terms of the overall picture. From the reports written, we know property booms have happened time and again. It is a classic boom-and-bust cycle that can take place. There is no great mystery about the dynamics of property booms. Professor Honohan used the phrase, "A plain vanilla boom-bust cycle", and that is what we had. To return to tax incentives, my guess is that they probably had more effect in terms of what particular locations were affected rather than the overall scale.