This paper analyzes the effect of interjurisdictional spillovers and congestion of local public services on the segregative properties of endogenous formation of jurisdictions. Households choosing to live at the same place form a jurisdiction which produces congested local public services, which generates positive spillovers to other jurisdictions. In every jurisdiction, the production of the local public services is financed through a local tax based on households' wealth. Local wealth tax rates are democratically determined in every jurisdiction. Households consume the available amount of public services in their jurisdiction and a composite private good. Any household is free to leave its jurisdiction for another that would increase its utility. A necessary and sufficient condition to have every stable jurisdiction structure segregated by wealth is identified: the public services must be either a gross substitute or a gross complement to the private good.

This paper examines the segregative properties of endogenous processes of jurisdiction formation in the presence of a competitive land market. In the considered model, a continuum of households with different income levels and the same preference for local public goods, private spending and housing choose a location from a finite set. Each location has an initial endowment of housing that is priced competitively and that belongs to absentee landlords. Each location is also endowed with a specific technology for producing public goods. Households' preferences are assumed to be homothetically separable between local public goods on the one hand and private spending and housing on the other. Public goods provision is financed by a given, but unspecified, mixture of (linear) wealth and housing taxes. It is shown that stable jurisdiction structures are segregated by income only if households have a Marshallian demand for any public good (conditionally on the quantities of the other public goods) that is a monotonic function of the price of private spending. It is also shown that if there is only one public good, or if household preferences are additively separable between public and private goods, then the condition is also sufficient for segregation. Examples showing the sensitivity of the results to the assumptions of homothetic separability and additive separability are also provided

International audienceThis paper examines the segregative properties of Tiebout-type process of jurisdiction formation by freely mobile households in the presence of a central government which makes equalization transfers across jurisdictions so as to maximize a generalized utilitarian or a max–min objective. It is shown that the introduction of such a central government significantly affects the set of stable jurisdiction structures. It is also shown that the class of households additively separable preferences that guarantees the wealth segregation of any stable jurisdiction structure is unaffected by the presence of a central government if this government uses a generalized utilitarian objective. Copyright Springer-Verlag 201