With each economic recession, scholars, pundits, and lawmakers focus on what the Federal government can do to mitigate it. In this Article, I argue that there is an important role for local tax law in managing recessions. Since real property taxes are the most important revenue source for local...

Despite its theoretical merits, Land Value Taxation (LVT) is not a common policy instrument in most countries. One of the main reasons is uncertainty regarding its distributional impacts. This uncertainty has not been settled by the literature, due to a lack of appropriate data at the household...

Several countries have recently abolished or significantly reduced their taxes on bequests. Bequest taxes, on the other hand, were among the first to be introduced when modern systems of taxation were developed at the end of the nineteenth century. We propose an explanation for these facts which...

This paper assesses the extent to which property taxes are capitalized into property values, exploiting the 2012 Italian tax reform. Municipal-level variation in the level of the property tax rates is instrumented using the exogenous staggered timing of local elections. We show that the...

This article explains who wins residential property tax appeals in Cook County, Illinois. It does so by collecting and combining public sector data, which has been recently released by the Cook County Assessor. The article, then, uses these data to compute three statistics. Lastly, it...

Although many politicians suggest that the primary purpose of any tax reform should be cutting taxes and achieving simplicity, the main problems of our tax system do not stem from either lack of simplicity or over-taxation. They have to do with provisions that have outlived their purpose, such...

Many states in the US have in recent years changed the mix of state and local revenue sources used to finance local public expenditures, especially primary and secondary education, with local property taxes being replaced by various sources of state tax revenue. This article examines the...

This paper examines why local governments rely heavily on the property tax, even when they have access to another revenue source, using data from Ohio's recent experience of permitting local school districts to use both property taxes and residence-based income taxes. Nechyba's (1997) theory...

Many developing countries have struggled with realizing sufficient revenues from property tax. However, as developing countries experience economic growth, they are also seeing property values rising, providing a bigger tax base from which to realize revenues. Technology has made tax...

We use results from the December 2016 CalSpeaks Survey to assess citizen understanding about how the property tax functions and the distributional impact of the tax. Key issues include (1) do California citizens today understand the provisions of Proposition 13 and the implications for how the...