Replication Data for: Competition in Local Land Use Planning?

The extent of the political fragmentation of metropolitan areas impedes effective land use planning in many countries, and eventually leads to urban sprawl. For some metropolises in the USA and Europe, strategic interaction between local policymakers co-determines the implementation of local planning policies. However, previous empirical analyses of this phenomenon resort to simple neighbourhood as the operationalization of interdependence in planning decisions. This is a common simplification in research on diffusion in public policies. Proceeding on the assumption that municipal zoning decisions are subject to competition between municipal authorities trying to attract new residents, I suggest an alternative conceptualization of location-choice competition in Tiebout-like economies: the correlations of out-commuting patterns serves as a proxy for the degree to which municipalities are competitors for mobile residents, irrespective of their contiguity. SAR models, estimated based on a large panel of fine-grained zoning data, reveal that zoning decisions in the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland’s most dynamic metropolitan area, are indeed subject to such interdependence.