Competing for New Residents? Assessing the Diffusion of Zoning Decisions Based on Commuting Networks

In most countries of the Western world, an increasing demand for space per capita for housing, leisure and mobility, coupled with a concentration of demand for labour in metropolitan areas, has induced a startling growth of the settlement areas in the past decades. Advancements of the transport networks have progressively detached living and working spaces, resulting in a high and increasing demand for low priced building land for housing in the surroundings of urban centres. As in other countries, the strong political fragmentation of metropolitan areas impedes effective land use planning in Switzerland. Relying on the principle of subsidiarity, local authorities plan their spatial development with little or no regard for the impact on the region as a whole. Since regional real estate markets are very complex and interdependent systems, however, the implementation of planning policies in single jurisdictions has been found to trigger strategic interaction between local policymakers. Examining patterns of strategic interaction in municipal zoning decisions in the Zurich metropolitan area, the planned analysis intends to contrast existing research by economists with an analysis in the tradition of policy diffusion research. Drawing on the Tiebout model combined with the assumption of rent-seeking policy-makers, zoning decisions in the canton of Zurich are expected to be driven by competitive behaviour of municipal authorities trying to attract potential new residents and businesses. As opposed to prior analyses of interdependence resorting to contiguity, the panel analyses are based on correlations of municipal out-commuting patterns as a proxy for the degree to which municipalities are substitutes as places of residence and thus potential competitors. A spatial simultaneous autoregressive model of a long time-series of data on the amount of building land zoned allows for novel insights on potential patterns of interdependence of land use policymaking in the Canton of Zurich and presumably elsewhere.