Tiebout Sorting in Metropolitan Areas: Is it Services and Taxes, Race and Ethnicity, or Something Else?

Abstract

From Introduction: "...In this paper, we tackle the issue of sorting at the metropolitan area by utilizing an alternative methodological approach that permits us to avoid problems plaguing earlier studies. For this analysis, we take two metropolitan areas as our test cases: the Houston MSA and the Atlanta MSA. For each metropolitan area, we employ Monte Carlo computer simulations to randomly create a large number (approximately 500) of metropolitan 'jurisdictional' groupings subject to three constraints: first, using census tracts as our basic building blocks we randomly group tracts together such that our hypothetical jurisdictions equal in number the existing number of general purpose jurisdictions in each MSA; second, the tracts are grouped so that each hypothetical jurisdiction is fully contiguous (i.e., no census tracts fail to touch at least one other tract in the jurisdiction; and third, the populations of each jurisdiction are within five percentage points (plus or minus) of existing jurisdictions within the metropolitan area."

Description

Keywords

decentralization, race relations, methodology, urban affairs, Tiebout hypothesis, Workshop

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