The Roles of Jurisdictional Competition and of Collective Choice Institutions in the Market for Local Public Goods
分析了蒂伯特提出的通过居民选择辖区来揭示地方公共品偏好的机制，并指出Oates的税收资本化检验存在计量识别问题，可能导致实证结论矛盾。
Having discovered and neatly portrayed the conditions for efficient provision of public goods, Paul Samuelson concluded that there was no viable mechanism for eliciting the information about preferences required to determine optimal public goods supply. Much subsequent theorizing about public finance decisions may be viewed as a quest for some demand-revealing mechanism which would refute Samuelson's assertion. Charles Tiebout, in particular, countered with the claim that a viable mechanism did exist for determining the optimal supply of local public goods. In his view, selfinterested individuals reveal their preferences for local public goods by their choice of jurisdiction. Tiebout reasoned that each individual adopts, from the menu of local fiscal environments, that local community which most closely reflects his preferences. He further argued that the greater the number and variety of communities, the more efficient would the public goods provision be. Without empirical support, this ingenious idea lay dormant for several years. The question remained as to whether the mechanism described by Tiebout, even if it existed, operated so that local jurisdictions effectively elicited and satisfied preferences for local public goods. Fundamental to answering this question was the necessity of designing an experiment which would reveal the result of voting with one's feet. No such experiment existed until Wallace Oates (1969) reasoned that operation of the Tiebout mechanism would result in the capitalization of differentials in fiscal variables into property values. His test findings indicated that indeed such capitalization was evident. At first, the results obtained by others who repeated and extended his experiment were generally consistent with his findings and hence his interpretation of the link between the Tiebout mechanism and the capitalization of fiscal variables. It was not long, however, before an alternative interpretation was suggested by Matthew Edel and Elliot Sclar, who argued that in the long run the Tiebout mechanism would result in no capitalization of differentials in taxes and public service levels. Their interpretation was precisely the opposite of that offered by Oates, and their empirical work -which indicated little evidence of capitalization-supported their interpretation. In retrospect, conflicting interpretations of the Tiebout hypothesis were almost inevitable given the absence of a formal model embodying the Tiebout mechanism. In an earlier paper with Michael Visscher, we argue that Tiebout's hypothesis is as follows: If individuals are able to choose from among a multiplicity of local jurisdictions, the result will be a Pareto-efficient provision of local public goods. We present two alternative models which differ in the technology for production of local public goods. One embodies the efficiency properties claimed by Tiebout, the other does not. Using these models we demonstrate that 1) Tax capitalization cannot be tested by the procedure proposed by Oates because the tax capitalization parameter is not econometrically identified-a possible reason for the contradictory empirical findings of Oates and of Edel and Sclar, and 2) A test of capitali*Associate professor, Carnegie-Mellon University, and assistant professor, Tulane University, respectively.