The Early Death of Charles Tiebout

Abstract

Charles Tiebout initiated a firestorm of discussion. In fact, his seminal article is perhaps the most frequently cited in public finance, and cited more than the treatises of Buchanan or Musgrave. The works by Buchanan notoriously attracted the attention of Paul Samuelson, the godfather of modern neoclassical economics. But by the time these debates with Samuelson and Buchanan had reached their apex, Charles Tiebout had moved on from Northwestern to the hotbed of Institutional Economics at the University of California in Los Angeles.