6533b853fe1ef96bd12ad255

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Stratégies d'influences et politiques de maîtrise de la croissance locale

subject

description

Over the last ten years, real estate prices have risen considerably and accordingly to most observers, this can at least partly be attributed to an insufficient supply, due to local growth control measures. This thesis tries to understand what motivates local authorities implementing such policies. Local politicians are considered as opportunistic and their decision is modelled as the result of a political struggle between different land-related interests. This game for influence mainly opposes the owners of developed and undeveloped land, who find allies amongst local business interests that might form growth or ideas machines. Our first model describes this struggle under different hypotheses concerning the influence of voting and lobbying. We show that the growth controls implemented might under some conditions be less strict the greater the percentage of homeowners in the local population – despite the fact that homeowners favour strict policies. When individuals are mobile, local decisions become interdependent, and under imperfect mobility our theoretically derived equilibrium solution can directly be interpreted as a spatial autoregressive model. Our empirical analysis concerning the “taxe locale d’équipement” confirms our predictions concerning strategic interactions and shows that local decisions are influenced by “homevoters” and ideas machines on the one side, and by the local farmers on the other side. Our second model examines if local politicians use growth control policies strategically in order to modify the local electorate in a manner that facilitates their re-election. Our model is based on probabilistic voting and the composition of the local population is considered as endogenous. Our empirical analysis confirms that zoning decisions are influenced by the mobility of the local electorate, even if we cannot ascertain that politicians are acting strategically.