This paper exploits an exogenous reform of the local fiscal equalization scheme in the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia to identify tax mimicking by municipalities in the neighboring state of Lower Saxony. The spatial lag regressions provide no evidence for the existence of strategic...

This article evaluates two alternative standards for resetting property assessments on title transfer in property tax systems like Oregon's and California's, which are explicitly designed to protect property owners against rapid, unanticipated increases in their tax bills: California's reset to...

Purpose and need for study: Given the enormous need for financial resources of local communities, imposed by the growing and diverse needs of citizens, our study aims at a holistic analysis of the need to reform the property tax system in Romania, as the main source of tax revenue available to...

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...

Using a cost-capacity gap framework, this paper is the first study to quantify nonschool fiscal disparities across Connecticut municipalities. In the absence of a Uniform Chart of Accounts for municipalities, the paper uses a newly assembled dataset of multi-year local financial records,...

This paper studies the revenue and base effects of local property and business tax hikes using a natural experiment in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). Due to a reform of the local equalization scheme in 2003, a set of municipalities in NRW increased their local tax rates by one...

The tax on immovable property recently started to regain its former significance, but the tax yield still remains low, with slightly more than 1% of GDP and wide variation across countries. Against this background this paper surveys property tax policy in OECD countries and analyses the...

The paper discusses some issues concerning the local property tax in the light of the Italian experience. The main developments concerning the municipal property tax in Italy, since its introduction and until the most recent events, are briefly described. Then three main issues regarding the...