This article argues that New York municipalities should integrate land banks into the tax enforcement process to break the unhealthy cycle perpetuated by real estate and lien speculators. By transferring all tax liens and foreclosed properties to local land banks, municipalities can generate an...

In a political agency model, we study the effect of introducing a less transparent tax tool for the financing of local governments. We show that lower quality politicians would use more the less transparent tax tool to enhance their probability of re-election. This prediction is tested by...

This Feature considers the debts of quasi-sovereign states in light of proposals to let them file for bankruptcy protection. States that have ceded some but not all sovereign prerogatives to a central government face distinct challenges as debtors. It is unhelpful to analyze these challenges...

In this article, updated approach to assess the impact of fiscal decentralization on economic development is offered. The relationship between the proper level of fiscal decentralization and economic growth for 27 advanced and emerging economies in Europe from 1992 to 2017 was evaluated using...

We set up a framework to conduct experiments for estimating spillover effects when units are grouped into mutually exclusive clusters. We improve upon existing methods by allowing for heteroskedasticity, intra-cluster correlation and cluster size heterogeneity, which are typically ignored when...

We develop a framework to conduct experiments for estimating direct and spillover effects when units are grouped into mutually exclusive clusters. Crucially, our framework accounts for heterogeneous treatment effects across clusters and heterogeneous cluster sizes, which are pervasive in...

This paper explores the early development of three important fiscal institutions faced by U.S. state governments: property tax limits (PTLs), balanced budget rules (BBRs), and the gubernatorial line-item veto (LIV). Specifically, this study attempts to provide historical context for their...

Two views dominate the debate about property tax incidence — the “capital tax” or “new” view, under which the tax distorts capital allocation and is borne primarily by capital owners, and the “benefit tax” view, under which the tax is an efficient user charge. Evidence of both...

This paper investigates the impact of property tax delinquency on the sales price of nearby residential properties, an effect that we call the “delinquency discount”. Using a unique data set from Chicago, we control for the duration of delinquency as well as the potential simultaneous...

This paper explores the effects of fiscal competition on local land use. A theoretical analysis considers the tradeoff faced by a local government deciding about the amount of land made available for commercial or residential uses, when its expansion has adverse effects on the quality of life....