Political Jurisdictions in Heterogeneous Communities

By A. Alesina, R. Baqir, C. Hoxby. Journal of Political Economy, 2004

440 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate whether political jurisdictions form in response to the trade‐off between economies of scale and the costs of a heterogeneous population. We consider heterogeneity in income, race, ethnicity, and religion, and we test the model using American school districts, school attendance areas, municipalities, and special districts. We find strong evidence of a trade‐off between economies of scale and racial heterogeneity; we also find evidence of a trade‐off between economies of scale and income heterogeneity. Conversely, we find little evidence that ethnic or religious heterogeneity shapes jurisdictions. To clarify the direction of causality between heterogeneity and jurisdictions, we exploit shocks to racial heterogeneity generated by the two world wars.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f1dede5eeca6d8ffa1508fbc5d01d6f143ef094

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Citations in the corpus

Trade, Growth and the Size of Countries (2003, background): “(1999) and Alesina et al. (2003) showed that ethnolinguistic fractionalization is inversely related to economic success and various measure of quality of government, economic freedom and democracy.”
The stability and breakup of nations: a quantitative analysis (2011, background): “Alesina et al. (2004) offer two reasons for this homogeneity bias, reflecting the preference of agents for more culturally homogeneous communities.”
Was Postwar Suburbanization "White Flight"? Evidence from the Black Migration (2010, neutral): “My preferred measure of the central city ﬁxes city boundaries according to their 1940 deﬁnition, foreclosing the possibility of an endogenous annexation response to changes in racial diversity (Austin 1999; Alesina, Baqir, and Hoxby 2004).”
Local Public Good Provision, Municipal Consolidation, and National Transfers (2008, neutral): “Related to the present paper are Alesina and Spolaore (1997), Bolton and Roland (1996, 1997), Goyal and Staal (2004), and Alesina, Baqir, and Hoxby (2004).4 In contrast to the present analysis, these papers assume that centralized policy is uniform.”
Causal Inference in Urban and Regional Economics (2014, neutral): “Alesina et al. (2004) employ such an approach for evaluating the effects of racial heterogeneity on the number of jurisdictions.”
Assessing the Importance of Tiebout Sorting: Local Heterogeneity from 1850 to 1990 (2003, background): “Other recent empirical papers have used the Tiebout framework to evaluate the effects of school competition (Epple et al., forthcoming), school choice (Caroline Hoxby, 2000), or to explain the number of local jurisdictions (Alberto Alesina et al., 2000).”
Do fairness and race matter in generosity? Evidence from a nationally representative charity experiment (2011, background): “Individuals also prefer to form racially homogenous political jurisdictions (Alesina et al., 2004).”
Social Connections and Group Banking (2007, background): “For instance, Alesina et al. (2004) find evidence for explicit tradeoffs between racial and income heterogeneity and economies of scale in the formation of local jurisdictions.”