Owners of vacation homes pay local property taxes, yet cannot vote on local referenda. From the standpoint of full–time residents, significant numbers of vacation homes reduce the real costs of public spending, since vacation home owners pay property taxes but consume very few public services....

Limitations on aspects of property taxation are widespread in the United States with 43 states having some form of limit. Previous research has focused on a desire by local residents to constrain local government expenditures as the primary motivation for these limitations. Another common...

Recent research in urban and regional economics has shown that cities have taken on a polycentric (as opposed to monocentric) form. Much attention has focused on identifying and categorizing the numerous employment centers in a vast number of metropolitan areas. However, these studies have...

The lack of property tax escrow accounts among subprime mortgages causes borrowers to make large lump-sum tax payments that reduce liquidity. Different property tax collection dates across states and counties create exogenous variation in the time between loan origination and the first property...

I develop a framework, based on tax price, that measures the distributional consequences of any alternative property tax base definition. Using administrative data, I show that defining tax base as market value produces large amounts of idiosyncratic tax-price risk. I show that an assessment...

This report looks at local governments’ biggest source of revenue: property taxes. The authors provide a primer on how the taxes are calculated, and new formulas for understanding an individual’s tax share. The authors also propose an alternative format for local property tax statements that...

The lack of property tax escrow accounts among subprime mortgages causes borrowers to make large lump-sum tax payments that reduce liquidity. Different property tax collection dates across states and counties create exogenous variation in the time between loan origination and the first property...