Tiebout's basic claim was that when public goods are local, competition between jurisdictions solves the free riding problem in the sense that equilibria exist and are always Pareto efficient. Unfortunately, the literature does not quite support this conjecture. For finite economies, one must...

This note shows that if commodities are tradable across jurisdictions, then it may be efficient to have heterogeneously sized jurisdictions, even if (i) consumers are identical, (ii) there is one private good and one public good, (iii) utility and production functions are not affected by...