TY  - JOUR
AU  - Epple,Dennis
AU  - Romer,Thomas
AU  - Sieg,Holger
TI  - The Tiebout Hypothesis and Majority Rule:  An Empirical Analysis
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 6977
PY  - 1999
Y2  - February 1999
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6977
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6977.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Dennis N. Epple
Tepper School of Business
Carnegie Mellon University
Posner Hall, Room 257B
Pittsburgh, PA  15213
Tel: 412/268-1536
Fax: 412/268-7357
E-Mail: epple@cmu.edu

Thomas Romer
Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ  08544-1021
E-Mail: romer@princeton.edu

Holger Sieg
Department of Economics
University of Pennsylvania
3718 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Tel: 215 898 7194
Fax: 215-573-2057
E-Mail: holgers@econ.upenn.edu
AB  - The paper provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of majority rule and Tiebout sorting within a system of local jurisdictions. The idea behind the estimation procedure is to investigate whether observed levels of public expenditures satisfy necessary conditions implied by majority rule in a general equilibrium model of residential choice.  The estimator controls for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity among households, observed and unobserved characteristics of communities, the potential endogeneity of prices and expenditures as well as the self-selection of households into communities of their choice.  We estimate the structural parameters of the model using data from the Boston Metropolitan Area.  The empirical findings are by and large supportive of our approach.
ER  -