This paper attempts to address two long standing questions in Public Finance: (i) why is the property tax, despite popular complaints about its fairness, the almost exclusive tax instrument used by local governments, and (ii) why do we consistently observe higher levels of governments undermine...

This paper examines the effect of federal deductibility of state and local taxes on the fiscal behavior of state and local governments. The primary finding is that deductibility affects the way that state-local governments finance their spending as well as the overall level of spending. More...

This paper considers the impact of federal deductibility on the level and composition of state and local taxes. It also considers the importance of deductibility in determining the vote of state Congressional delegations on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Particular emphasis should be placed on the...

Control of public spending and revenues is increasingly being left to states and localities. In order to understand the consequences of such a movement on the distribution of social spending, it is necessary to understand how fiscal distress will affect state and local budgets. This paper...

This paper introduces a computable general equilibrium model of intergovernmental relations in which heterogeneous agents (i) are endowed with income and houses, (ii) are fully mobile between multiple jurisdictions, and (iii) vote in both local and state elections to determine local property and...

A key question in the design of public assistance to the needy is how allocation of responsibility for funding and decision-making across different levels of government influences the level and type of assistance provided. The New Deal era was a period in which this allocation changed...

This paper studies the role of technology in local-government tax collection capacity in the developing world. We first conduct a new census of all local governments in Ghana to document a strong association between technology use and property tax billing, collection and enforcement. We then...

We show how to use field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and their associated high-level synthesis (HLS) compilers to solve heterogeneous agent models with incomplete markets and aggregate uncertainty (Krusell and Smith, 1998). We document that the acceleration delivered by one single FPGA is...

This paper investigates the simultaneous relationship between tax rates and city property tax bases using data for 86 large U.S. cities in 1967, 1972, 1977, and 1982. We find that a 10 percent increase in the city's property tax rate decreases the city's tax base by about 1.5 percent. In...

This paper provides careful estimates of the impact of removing the deductibility of state and local taxes by state andby income class. We show how deductibility affects marginal and average tax rates for both state and federal tax systems. One striking result is that combined federal income tax...