Tiebout, Charles Mills (1924–1968)

Abstract

Tiebout was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, took his BA from Wesleyan University in 1950, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1957. After holding appointments at Northwestern (1954–8) and the University of California at Los Angeles (1958–62), he became professor of economics and business administration at the University of Washington at Seattle in 1962. He died on 16 January 1968. By far his most important work was his ‘Pure Theory of Local Public Expenditure’, which appeared in the October number of the Journal of Political Economy for 1956, from which is derived the so-called Tiebout hypothesis, which is the subject of a separate article in this Dictionary. However, his work on problems in regional and urban economics was more extensive than this one theoretical article on the local provision of public goods might suggest.