Roads cover a significant fraction of the land area in many municipalities. The public provision of roads means this land is exempt from the local property tax. Transferring roads from public to private ownership would not only remove maintenance costs from city budgets, but increase potential...

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...

This paper examines real property tax as a determinant of tenure choice. The analysis is conducted in two stages. First, parameter estimates for a reduced-form homeownership model are obtained through multivariate analysis of data drawn from the U.S. Survey of Income and Program Participation...

Restrictions imposed on property assessment practices by state legislation such as Proposition 13 in California and Proposition 2 1/2 in Massachusetts can lead to significant divergences between the assessed and market values of property, particularly for households with long tenures. As...

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...

This paper investigates whether and how strongly the share of homeowners in a community affects residential property taxation by local governments. Different from renters, homeowners bear the full property tax burden irrespective of local market conditions, and the tax is more salient to them....

This paper investigates whether and how strongly the share of homeowners in a community affects residential property taxation by local governments. Different from renters, homeowners bear the full property tax burden irrespective of local market conditions, and the tax is more salient to them....

The external costs and benefits of large capital-intensive projects often occur on dramatically different spatial scales. When local jurisdictions have control over land use, this spatial mismatch can prevent socially beneficial projects from moving forward or allow socially harmful projects to...

We study the history and geography of wealth accumulation in the US, using newly collected historical property tax records since the early 1800s. The US General Property Tax was a comprehensive tax on all types of property (real, personal, and financial), making it one of the first "wealth...