Tiebout Sorting and Neighborhood Stratification / Patrick Bayer, Robert McMillan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bayer, Patrick.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

McMillan, Robert.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w17364.

NBER working paper series no. w17364

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2011.

Summary:

Tiebout's classic 1956 paper has strong implications regarding stratification across and within jurisdictions, predicting in the simplest instance a hierarchy of internally homogeneous communities ordered by income. Typically, urban areas are less than fully stratified, and the question arises how much departures from standard Tiebout assumptions contribute to observed within-neighborhood mixing. This paper quantifies the separate effects on neighborhood stratification of employment geography (via costly commuting) and preferences for housing attributes. It does so using an equilibrium sorting model, estimated with rich Census micro-data. Simulations based on the model using credible preference estimates show that counterfactual reductions in commuting costs lead to marked increases in racial and education segregation and, to a lesser degree, increases in income segregation, given that households now find it easier to locate in neighborhoods with like households. While turning off preferences for housing characteristics increases racial segregation, especially for blacks, doing so reduces income segregation, indicating that heterogeneity in the housing stock serves to stratify households based on ability-to-pay. Further, we show that differences in housing also help accentuate differences in the consumption of local amenities.

Notes:

Print version record

August 2011.