The electoral migration cycle

This paper proposes a new test of Tiebout sorting that relies on the exogenous time structure of recurrent local elections. The test is based on the idea that competitive elections represent periodic perturbations to the Tiebout equilibrium of local public good provision and allocation of households to communities, so that their schedule should affect the timing of households' sorting decisions. On the other hand, internal migration flows that have nothing to do with the demand for public goods over which localities vote recurrently ought to be orthogonal to the timing of elections in a reduced-form migration equation. I exploit the staggered schedule of mayoral elections in Italy to analyze migration, elections, and public budget data across several thousands of municipalities, and find evidence of a systematic influence of the electoral calendar on the timing of sorting decisions.