Reforming state and local government property taxes can contribute to a fairer and more sustainable housing system as well as delivering additional economic and social dividends. This research proposed a nationally coordinated incremental strategy with clearly defined short, medium and long-term...

Over the past three decades, more than a dozen developed nations have abandoned their wealth taxes. Yet the United States today finds itself in the midst of a political debate about implementing a wealth tax to partially fund the spending commitments of progressive presidential hopefuls. The...

This research explores relatively successful reforms of the local property tax system in the four largest city councils in Sierra Leone. Deriving lessons from differing outcomes across the four councils, it highlights three key messages about the determinants of successful reform. First,...

Findings by various researchers suggest that ad valorem malassessments are best understood if one realizes their political consequences for assessing officials. High assessment dispersion often results from the assessors' sensitivities to political influence. Also, political incentives may...

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...

French analyses of estate taxation often looks at the ISF wealth tax and nothing else. The initial idea of the lawmakers behind the ISF - implemented in 1981- was firstly to impose a levy on goods providing their owners with the wherewithal to pay more in tax, secondly to create a redistribution...

Optimal government unit size is a subject of continued concern among tax economists. Aspiring for the economies of scale and cost savings, Indiana recently consolidated its township assessor functions to the county level. This paper finds that following reform the new structure resulted in...

We investigate the effect on municipality spending efficiency of a local property tax reform, which reduced in 2008 the upper limit of the property tax. We compute municipality efficiency scores via data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) from 2005 to 2011, and then we rely in a panel data set to...

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...