Tieboutian clubs revisited

This paper examines the evolution of Tieboutian clubs over time and across metropolitan regions. We address this topic by examining a large set of socioeconomic characteristics of metropolitan regions to assess empirically whether and how those member attributes may figure into a Tiebout sorting process. The method entails factor analysis to reduce an initial set of forty-nine variables to a much smaller number of factors that represent groups of intercorrelated variables. An analysis of variance is then undertaken on the corresponding factor scores to assess whether census tracts within municipalities are more alike than those between municipalities. We do this for the Los Angeles metropolitan region using census data from 1970, 1990 and 2020, and we repeat the process for the twenty largest metropolitan regions (core-based statistical areas) in the USA for 2020. Several key results emerge from this analysis. While in most cases seven or eight factors emerge repeatedly, four are most persistent and ubiquitous; these pertain to economic class, race, age cohort and immigration status. These are, in effect, the most enduring fundamental aspects of the socioeconomic landscape in metropolitan regions in the USA. The final question addressed by our work links back to the original motivation, which is to assess the role of municipalities in the formation of these clubs. We do so for the twenty largest metropolitan regions in the USA. The results from our analyses of variance are compelling. With very few exceptions we find that census tracts with similar club characteristics have a strong tendency to be co-located within the same municipalities. This strong result holds regardless of which metropolitan region we examined, or which decade. This affirms that municipalities are indeed Tieboutian clubs.