Despite its theoretical merits, Land Value Taxation (LVT) is not a common policy instrument in most countries. One of the main reasons is uncertainty regarding its distributional impacts. This uncertainty has not been settled by the literature, due to a lack of appropriate data at the household...

We analyze the welfare implications of property taxation. Using a sufficient statistics approach, we show that the tax incidence depends on how housing prices, labor and other types of incomes as well as public services respond to property tax changes. Empirically, we exploit the German...

We investigate the effect on municipality spending efficiency of a local property tax reform, which reduced in 2008 the upper limit of the property tax. We compute municipality efficiency scores via data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) from 2005 to 2011, and then we rely in a panel data set to...

We develop a model of property taxation and characterize equilibria under three alternative taxation regimes often used in the public finance literature: decentralized taxation, centralized taxation, and “rent seeking” regimes. We show that decentralized taxation results in inefficiently...

We study how reported wealth responds to changes in wealth tax rates. Exploiting rich intra-national variation in Switzerland, the country with the highest revenue share of annual wealth taxation in the OECD, we find that a 1 percentage point drop in the wealth tax rate raises reported wealth by...

Housing transfer taxes are fiscally important in many countries despite evidence of substantial welfare losses found in several quasi-experimental studies. Research designs used in this prior literature are prone to attenuation bias due to spillovers from mobility or trading across control and...

We examine two Pakistani programs to explore the role of deterrence as well as social and psychological factors in the tax compliance behavior of agents. In the first of these programs, the government began revealing income tax paid by every taxpayer in the country. The second program publicly...

We show how normative standpoints determine optimal taxation of wealth. Since wealth is not equal to capital, we find very different welfare implications of land rent-, bequest- and capital taxation. It is mainly land rents that should be taxed. We develop an overlapping generations model with...

Like in many other countries, wealth inequality has increased in Switzerland over the last fifty years. By providing new evidence on cantonal top wealth shares for each of the 26 cantons since 1969, we show that the overall trend masks striking differences across cantons, both in levels and...

We explore cheating in a die roll task in response to information about tax evasion in a large-scale experiment on a representative sample of the Italian population. We thus generalise laboratory findings on conditional behaviours (cooperation, cheating) to uncover their real-world bearing in...