Ownership of real estate through corporations in offshore tax havens creates opportunities for tax evasion and money laundering and may have undesirable effects in housing markets. In this paper, we study offshore ownership of real estate in the United Kingdom by combining several data sources:...

We develop a programming algorithm that predicts a balanced-panel mix-adjusted house price index for arbitrary spatial units from repeated cross-sections of geocoded micro data. The algorithm combines parametric and non-parametric estimation techniques to provide a tight local fit where the...

We estimate the transmission of the pandemic shock in 2020 to prices in the residential and commercial real estate market by causal machine learning, using new granular data at the municipal level for Germany. We exploit differences in the incidence of Covid infections or short-time work at the...

We show that the optimal property tax rate rises with the ratio of land rents to structure and land development costs. California’s high ratio of income to property tax revenue and the distribution of Federal housing subsidies thus appear geographically misplaced. Proportional taxation of...

Atkinson and Stiglitz (Journal of Public Economics 1976) show that when the government has access to non-linear income taxation and consumer preferences are separable between consumption and leisure, there is no need for differentiated commodity taxation. This paper examines the empirical...

The presence of extensive housing subsidies characterises the current tax systems as inefficient. In this paper, we study whether inefficiency is the price to be paid to improve equity, by assessing the actual distributive impact of housing taxation on Italian households. We concentrate on the...

In this paper we examine the degree to which Michigan's property value assessment growth cap has eroded the tax base and created substantial differences in effective tax rates among residential properties within the City of Detroit. While the analysis focuses on a specific city with significant...

Financing productive public capital through distortionary taxes typically creates a trade-off: the optimal investment is determined as a compromise between efficiency-enhancing public investment and perturbing market efficiency, but is never socially optimal. In contrast, such a trade-off can...

Eric Jones has found that excessive taxes were detrimental for pre-modern China's economic growth whereas moderate taxes were conducive for Europe's economic growth. This paper provides a political-economic answer to the question why these two tax systems came about. Taxation is only feasible...

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...