抄録
This paper investigates Tiebout's conjecture on the role of heterogeneity in tastes for local public goods in the context of income-tax competition and Helpman-type model of New Economic Geography (NEG, hereafter). We identify two symmetric regions that compete for capital, which is mobile instantaneously between regions and is combined with an immobile factor, land, to produce the housing service. Following the literature of tax competition, it is assumed that each local government spends the tax revenue for providing local public goods in its region. Workers are producing differentiated private goods that facilitate the agglomeration economy as in NEG literature. They choose to migrate to the preferable region in the long run. We assume that uniform distribution is carried out according to the degree of attachment to public goods. We show that agglomeration economies tend to appear when transportation costs are high, which is similar to the result of Helpman-type NEG model, while it is also shown that heterogeneity of preferences for public goods works as either centripetal or centrifugal force, depending on the parameters in simulations. That is, the heterogeneity of households might not work as the dispersion force such as immobile workers in Krugman-type NEG model. This result implies that many patterns might exist in population arrangement that Tiebout's conjecture asserts under the settings of income-tax competition and the agglomeration forces in private sectors.
