In this paper, we examine the effects of changes in property tax rates and school spending on residential and business property value growth in southeast Michigan. We use panel data for 152 communities in the five counties surrounding Detroit between the years 1983 and 2002, a period during...

Restrictions imposed on property assessment practices by state legislation such as Proposition 13 in California and Proposition 2½ in Massachusetts can lead to significant divergences between the assessed and market values of property, particularly for households with long tenures. As...

How to incorporate hard-to-measure assets into the wealth tax? We analyze the effect of an optimal wealth tax on risk-taking behavior and welfare when investors do not only have the standard portfolio choice with a well-diversified market portfolio, but can alternatively choose to invest all...

The growing dissatisfaction with perceived distributional inequality and budgetary constraints gave rise to a discussion on the (re-)introduction of wealth taxes. Wealth taxes are typically levied on private wealth, in some countries also on corporate wealth. To avoid misleading statements...

We study the effects of wealth taxation on reported wealth. Our analysis is based on data for Switzerland, which has the highest rate of annual wealth taxation in the developed world. While the wealth tax base is defined at the federal level, tax rates vary considerably across locations and over...

This paper examines the role of bequests and of taxation on bequests for the distribution of wealth. We investigate a model with overlapping generations and heterogenous households where parents derive utility directly from their bequests. Using the coefficient of variation as the measure of...

Recent books by Thomas Piketty (Piketty, 2014) and Anthony Atkinson (Atkinson, 2015) have brought the annual wealth tax back on the policy agenda. Both authors suggest using the annual wealth tax to supplement the redistributional effects of the income tax, assigning it a role as a...

The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, leading to deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....

The Dutch Parliament has passed legislation for a new income tax that abolishes the current tax on personal capital income and substitutes it by a presumptive capital income tax, which is in fact a net wealth tax. This paper contrasts this wealth tax with a conventional realization-based capital...

There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an 'optimal' tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...