Strategic Housing Policy, Migration and Sorting around Population Thresholds

Kristof De Witte and Benny Geys

No 5639, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We analyse whether, when and how local office-holders respond to the personal, economic incentives embedded in exogenously imposed population thresholds leading to an increased number and/or remuneration of local office-holders. Using data from all 589 Belgian municipalities over the period 1977-2014, local politicians are found to purposefully influence population growth through policy measures aimed at stimulating net in-migration when approaching important population thresholds. We provide evidence that strategic housing policy decisions – i.e. granting additional building permits early in the election cycle to maximize population growth just before the ‘deadline’ to surpass a population threshold – act as a key mechanism.

Keywords: rent-seeking; political agency; regression discontinuity designs; building permits (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H70 J18 R23 R38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp5639.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_5639

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().