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...

In 2001 the state of Minnesota reduced the weights assigned to non-residential property in local property tax bases, which increased residents' price of raising property tax revenue and affords the opportunity to identify the tax price elasticity of local tax revenues and expenditures. Results...

This paper applies a consistent framework to four comparably sized metropolitan areas to identify and characterize their employment centers. Employment centers are identified as places that exceed a threshold employment density and a threshold employment level. They are also characterized as...

This paper considers a two-community model with free mobility, public expenditures set by majority voting, amenities that differ across communities, and two types of taxpayers sorting across communities according to different preferences. Residents pay local taxes, consume public services, and...

I develop a framework, based on tax price, which 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...