Staff involved: Christian Hilber
During the last 40 years the phenomenon of urban sprawl has progressively become widespread in most developed countries. Its surge has typically been associated to rising incomes coupled with the large-scale distribution of the car which, by reducing transportation costs, allowed individuals to move from compact urban centres to less densely populated areas.
In this project we focus on Switzerland to explore (i) the determinants of urban sprawl and (ii) the political responses to urban sprawl. A first sub-project (Hilber, Schöni, von Ehrlich) considers the impact of two policies through which administrative units in a decentralized government may affect sprawl patterns: local tax policies and regulatory policies. We investigate the complementarity of these two policies in a setting in which local jurisdictions compete against each other to attract residents and assess their impact on urban sprawl.
The second sub-project (Hilber and Schöni) exploits a natural experiment in Switzerland: the ‘Second Home Initiative’, which banned second home investments in touristic areas, as a political reaction to increased sprawl in these areas. We explore whether the initiative – via adversely affecting the local economy and restricting the option to convert primary homes into second homes – had the effect of lowering prices of primary homes.