Endogenous jurisdictions formation and its segregative properties : a survey of the literature
Résumé
This paper provides a survey of the literature on human regrouping based on voluntary participation, with a focus on the theoretical and empirical articles dealing with the endogenous processes of jurisdictions formation and its segregative properties. We start from Tiebout's intuitions: households reveal their preferences for the public good by choosing the community according to a trade-off between the tax rate implemented by the different jurisdictions and the amount of public good they provide. Then, the paper analyses how such intuitions have been modeled in the literature, and reviews the different questions that economists have examined: the existence of an equilibrium, its properties in terms of efficiency, the definition of segregation and the theoretical and empirical results on the segregative properties of endogenous jurisdiction formation.