I develop a framework, based on tax price, which measures the distributional consequences of any alternative property tax base definition. Using administrative data, I show that defining tax base as market value produces large amounts of idiosyncratic tax-price risk. I show that an assessment...

Popular wisdom and economic research suggest that the quality of the neighborhood school should be an important determinant of housing values. Many researchers have found that housing values are higher where school spending or student test scores are higher. However, few economists consider...

This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the responses of municipalities to tax rates in their neighbouring...

In this paper, we study the optimal choices of the federal income tax, federal transfers, and local taxes in a dynamic model of capital accumulation and with explicit gamestructure s among multipleprivateage nts, multiplelocal governments, and the federal government. In general, the optimal...

This paper provides updated estimates of the impact of three financial frictions—negative equity, mortgage lock-in, and property tax lock-in—on household mobility. We add the 2009 wave of the American Housing Survey (AHS) to our sample and also create an improved measure of permanent moves...

The emerging land-related unrest in China poses a pressing challenge on the legitimacy of the government. Through the perspective of good governance, the paper examines the role of land in government financing and its economic and political cost, as well as the erosion of government's...

We explore the influence of property taxes on home prices, taking advantage of a policy experiment of property taxation in Shanghai and in Chongqing starting from January 2011. Using the approach suggested by Hsiao, Ching and Wan (2012) we estimate hypothetical home prices in the absence of...