One of the immediate political difficulties of federal legislation during the COVID-19 pandemic is in the delivery of aid made available to state and local governments. However, due to differences in administrative and budgeting processes, there is variation in the timing between damages to...

Local governments across the U.S. have had a prominent role in financing the pandemic response during the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak and economic recession. Yet, such governments are increasingly facing budgetary strain as sources of tax revenue evaporate. If the financial burden on such...

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. that states may require sellers without a physical presence to collect use taxes has generated much enthusiasm and dread among observers. We present new data on revenues from the state use tax between 2010 and 2017. We also present a...

While the use of tax amnesty programs has been commonplace for decades among both states and local governments, historically these offers have rarely been extended to delinquent real property taxes. In the last 10 years, however, there have been 26 property tax amnesties offered by local...

The textbook view of the real property tax is that the tax rate is simply a residual, determined by dividing the revenue to be raised from the property tax by the taxable base of assessed values. As such, tax rate adjustment is automatic and changes in assessed values are neutral with respect to...

In hedonic analysis, a common approach for eliciting information regarding the welfare significance of some landmark or (dis)amenity is to control for its distance from each observation. Unfortunately, the effects of distances to amenities on housing prices are generally not consistent...

This paper employs Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports of the 35 largest population American cities from 2005 to 2011 to examine how these cities managed the Great Recession, which was a global macroeconomic shock particularly damaging to the housing sector. While broader surveys of local...

The previous literature on vertical equity in property assessment has focused on parcel level data within a single area, and has produced mixed conclusions on whether the process is progressive or regressive. This paper advances the discussion to identifying what differences between...

Previous research has shown that Tiebout-style fiscal competition among local governments reduces the likelihood of adopting income taxes. This literature has not yet considered the impact of yardstick competition on tax instrument choice. This paper employs spatial econometrics to test for...

State revenue forecasts are a subject of seemingly constant critique from politicians, the media, and the academy over the nature of their outcomes as measured by the ability to accurately predict available resources. The opportunity to introduce political biases into the revenue baseline,...