Abstract
This article explores ways in which land use policy outcomes vary across contexts focusing, as an example, on urban growth boundaries. Specifically, it analyzes how various contextual factors interact with the policy and generate diverging development outcomes by employing a kernel-based regularized least squares method. Results show that the policy effectiveness is largely dependent on the region’s population size, initial density levels, and organizational conditions. The presence of urban growth boundaries also appears to shape the way other determinants influence development patterns, suggesting that the policy can both directly and indirectly promote a more compact/contiguous pattern of development.