Property taxes impact the housing distribution across generations. Low property taxes lead to concentrated ownership among elderly empty-nesters, limiting housing for financially constrained young families. Conversely, high property taxes act as a “forced mortgage,” reducing upfront...

We quantify the housing-consumption channel in mortgage demand according to which households borrow more following house-price increases since housing and non-housing consumption are imperfect substitutes. To identify this channel, we take a structural approach to mortgage demand and supply,...

This paper provides novel evidence on the role of income taxes for residential rents and spatial sorting. Drawing on comprehensive apartment-level data, we identify the effects of tax differentials across municipal boundaries in Switzerland. The boundary discontinuity design (BDD) corrects for...

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...

Do citizens engage in comparative performance evaluation across local governments? And if they do, how can we disentangle this behavior from other forms of strategic interactions among local governments or simple spatial correlation across neighboring jurisdictions? We use spatial econometrics...

This paper reveals a noticeable difference between a high degree of progressivity of incomerelated local property tax relief versus the proportional or regressive incidence of recognition tax relief. Recognition tax relief is tax relief given to specified social sectors which recognizes either...

Restrictions imposed on property assessment practices by state legislation such as Proposition 13 in California and Proposition 2 1/2 in Massachusetts can lead to significant divergences between the assessed and market values of property, particularly for households with long tenures. As...

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 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 high...