EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Do People Vote with Their Feet? An Empirical Test of Tiebout

Spencer Banzhaf and Randall Walsh

American Economic Review, 2008, vol. 98, issue 3, 843-63

Abstract: Charles Tiebout's suggestion that people "vote with their feet" for communities with optimal bundles of taxes and public goods has played a central role in local public finance for over 50 years. Using a locational equilibrium model, we derive formal tests of his premise. The model predicts increased population density in neighborhoods experiencing exogenous improvements in public goods and, for large improvements, increased relative mean incomes. We test these hypotheses in the context of changing air quality. Our results provide strong empirical support for the notion that households "vote with their feet" for environmental quality.

JEL-codes: D72 H41 H73 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.98.3.843
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (312)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.98.3.843 (application/pdf)
http://www.aeaweb.org/aer/data/june08/20060190_data.zip (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

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:aea:aecrev:v:98:y:2008:i:3:p:843-63

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Review is currently edited by Esther Duflo

More articles in American Economic Review from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().

 
Page updated 2024-12-13
Handle: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:98:y:2008:i:3:p:843-63