Council tax is levied on the occupiers of residential property to help fund the provision of local services. Individual Scottish councils set the tax rates for their area, but it is the Scottish Government that determines the tax base to which the tax rates apply. With properties still assigned...

This paper investigates gender disparities in residential property ownership and tax compliance in a large Argentine municipality using detailed tax administrative data. While ownership is evenly distributed between women, men, and co-owned properties up to the 40th percentile of the value...

This paper examines the fiscal and extra-fiscal effects of decentralizing the collection of Brazil's rural land tax from the federal level to local governments. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we assess the impact of local tax enforcement on revenue, land use, and...

The shift from administrative to market-based valuation of assets is a key part of Ukraine's transition from a planned to a market economy. This shift will improve the functioning of financial markets and the ability of local governments to obtain revenue effectively for local service provision....

Property taxes impact the housing distribution across generations. Low property taxes lead to concentrated ownership among elderly empty-nesters, limiting housing for financially constrained young families. Conversely, high property taxes act as a “forced mortgage,” reducing upfront...

Property taxes are often under-exploited sources of local public revenues. A broad-based tax, raised at modest rates, can potentially generate significantly higher revenues in many countries, and meet most of the costs of improved local public services. This note provides a practical guide to...

Different types of taxation include the market value of housing or housing returns in their tax base, making it essential to obtain accurate and up-to-date assessments of property values. However, to value residential property represents a major challenge for tax administrations due to...

Der vorliegende Beitrag schätzt die Bürokratiekosten der Grundsteuerreform 2022 mit Hilfe des Standardkostenmodells der Bundesregierung (SKM) und qualitativer Experteninterviews auf eine Bandbreite von 3,84 Mrd. € und 6,88 Mrd. € (im Mittelwert 5,37 Mrd. €). Dies entspricht 3,48 % und...

Nachdem das Bundesverfassungsgericht 2018 die bisherige Grundsteuererhebung für verfassungswidrig erklärt hat, haben elf Bundesländer das sogenannte Bundesmodell als Nachfolgeverfahren gewählt. Es basiert weiterhin auf einer Bewertung der Grundstücke mithilfe des modifizierten...

We quantify the housing-consumption channel in mortgage demand according to which households borrow more following house-price increases since housing and non-housing consumption are imperfect substitutes. To identify this channel, we take a structural approach to mortgage demand and supply,...

We investigate the welfare implications of property taxation. We apply a sufficient statistics approach that accounts for the distributional effects of tax changes at the household level within a spatial equilibrium framework. We show that equity effects are driven by price adjustments in the...

Using high-frequency administrative data covering millions of US homeowners, I document three novel facts about homeowner responses to property tax increases driven by rising home values. First, non-migrating homeowners cut consumption, exhibit financial distress, and do not borrow against their...

We quantify the housing-consumption channel in mortgage demand according to which households borrow more following house-price increases since housing and non-housing consumption are imperfect substitutes. To identify this channel, we take a structural approach to mortgage demand and supply,...

Can the provision of public goods strengthen the fiscal capacity of governments in developing countries and move them toward an equilibrium of widespread tax compliance? We present evidence of the impact of local public infrastructure on tax compliance, leveraging a large public investment...

Boston's high housing costs reflect a historic failure to build enough units to satisfy demand. Interest rates and construction costs have risen recently, and the flow of new market-rate residential housing projects has slowed. To spur more construction, the City of Boston is considering various...

Property taxes are regarded by economists as good taxes for local governments. Yet property tax revenues rarely exceed 3 percent of gross domestic product in any country and usually amount to much less than that. Moreover, jurisdictions that levy property taxes rarely do so in a way that adheres...

GPT-4 performs vastly better than ChatGPT or GPT-3.5 on legal tasks like the bar exam and statutory reasoning. To test GPT-4’s abilities, we ran it on our final exams this semester and graded its output alongside students’ exams. We found that it produced smoothly written answers that failed...

This paper studies the role of real estate prices on employment fluctuations. We focus on the relative importance of the housing wealth and firm collateral channel on employment. We use empirical evidence from Italian municipality data and feature a quantitative model with financial frictions to...

This paper studies the relationship between the estate tax and the size of pre-tax bequests of (wealthy) donors: the micro elasticity of bequests. I do this for the two most popular bequest motives discussed in the literature under which this elasticity may be different from zero: warm glow and...

Many states turn in sizable part to local property taxes to finance public education. Political and academic discourse on the extent to which these taxes should serve in this role largely centers on second-order issues, such as the vices and virtues of local control, the availability of...

We develop a framework to conduct experiments for estimating direct and spillover effects when units are grouped into mutually exclusive clusters. Crucially, our framework accounts for heterogeneous treatment effects across clusters and heterogeneous cluster sizes, which are pervasive in...