Is there a connection between the Federal subsidy for home ownership and urban sprawl? Should the Federal government encourage homeownership? Does the home mortgage interest deduction encourage homeownership for all Americans? Is the cost of the home mortgage interest deduction justified? This...

We show strong overall and heterogeneous economic incidence effects, as well as distortionary effects, of only shifting statutory incidence (i.e., the agent on which taxes are levied), without any tax rate change. For identification, we exploit a tax change and administrative data from the...

House prices have increased significantly in Canada over the past decade, driving household debt and residential construction activity to historical highs. Although macro-prudential tightening has slowed the pace of household borrowing in the last few years, house prices have continued to trend...

Fiscal stimulus has been suggested as a tool to prevent excessive price declines by creating incentives to increase current demand. In 2008 and 2009 the U.S. Congress passed several housing tax credits to encourage activity in the residential real estate market. This paper examines the impact of...

This paper revisits the mortgage interest deduction (MID) in the U.S. and its distribution across households using ZIP-code level data from the IRS Statistics of Income. Since the Great Recession, the total and average amount of mortgage interest deducted has fallen significantly along with the...

The mortgage interest deduction is often criticized for contributing to after-tax income inequality. Yet the effects of the mortgage interest deduction on income inequality are more nuanced than the conventional wisdom would suggest. We show that the mortgage interest deduction causes...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) on mortgage pricing and to measure the GST shifting ratio of Australian credit unions.Design/methodology/approach – Using the proprietary data from 79 credit unions in Australia, we perform...

This paper examines the impact of the combined U.S. state and federal mortgage interest deduction (MID) on homeownership attainment, using data from 1984 to 2007 and exploiting variation in the subsidy arising from changes in the MID within and across states over time. We test whether...

Mortgage subsidies affect homeownership costs by reducing effective mortgage rates and increasing house prices. I show analytically the role of mortgage subsidies in determining house price changes, economic incidence, and efficiency costs using a theoretical framework for applied welfare...

Since 1970, average house prices have risen four and a half fold after inflation. No other OECD country’s experience has even come close. The UK’s housing stock is not just inadequate in total, but much of it is also in the ‘wrong place’, because what little development we have is skewed...