Content area
Full Text
Public Choice (2007) 131:253255 DOI 10.1007/s11127-006-9128-7
BOOK REVIEW
William A. Fischel, ed., The Tiebout Model at Fifty: Essays in Public Economics in Honor of Wallace Oates. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2006, xxi + 339 pages. USD 30.00 (paper).
C Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007In 1956 the Journal of Political Economy published A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures by Charles M. Tiebout. For the next 13 years, the article attracted little attention from the economics profession. Beginning in 1969, however, with the publication of Wallace Oatess The Effects of Property Taxes and Local Public Spending on Property Values: An Empirical Study of Tax Capitalization and the Tiebout Hypothesis, interest grew at such a pace that in 1983 the twenty-fth anniversary of the publication of Tiebouts paper was marked by a conference volume edited by George Zodrow and 2006 produced this conference volume to commemorate the ftieth anniversary. As with any set of proceedings from a conference, the papers are uneven in quality and relevance. Indeed, some are only remotely related to the original Tiebout model and hypothesis, but there is real value to several of the papers.
The editors introduction provides a brief biography of Charles Tiebout and speculates about the reasons for the lack of initial interest in Tiebouts paper. The main idea of the paper purportedly originated in a joking way as an alternative to the usual proposition that efciency in public goods provision requires a collective decision process. It then lay dormant until Tiebout resurrected it after establishing himself at Northwestern. In the same way that the model originated casually, Tiebout let it lapse just as casually. He published a few unremarkable derivative papers in the following years, and then moved on to make his reputation elsewhere.
In the second paper, Wallace Oates comments on the differing interpretations of the Tiebout model. Is it a counterargument to the conventional wisdom that collective action is needed to solve the preference revelation problem in the presence of a public good? Or is it a rst step toward a descriptive model of local public nance? Or is it a local public sector analogue to the standard private...