Footloose at Fifty : An Introduction to the Tiebout Anniversary Essays

This essay is the introduction to a volume commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Tiebout's A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures, which was first published in the Journal of Political Economy in October 1956. It presents biographical and contextual information about Charles Tiebout, who died in 1968, to explain the initially modest influence of his article in the 1950s and 1960s and its accelerating influence since 1970. Wallace Oates's 1969 empirical study of capitalization was the catalyst for scholarly interest in the Tiebout model, but political and economic trends that undermined confidence in centralized government have widened its influence. The balance of the introduction assays the nine other original articles in the volume. The Tiebout model remains the touchstone of the analysis of local government activities, especially public education and land-use regulation, but its influence now informs the economic analysis of geographic mobility on a wider scale