We analyze an economy in which desirable land is inelastically supplied. A single government sets taxes on labor income, real property, and other commodities subject to the constraint that pure land rents and elastically supplied land development and structures are taxed at a common rate. The...

Annuities, long-term care insurance (LTCI), and reverse mortgages appear to offer important consumption smoothing benefits to the elderly, yet private markets for these products are small. A prominent idea is to combine LTCI and annuities to alleviate both supply (selection) and demand...

This paper analyzes the effects of land use constraints on housing prices. We provide a new framework for evaluating policy when mobility across regions is allowed but limited. A key result is that loosening regulatory constraints within individual regions would have little effect on prices for...

We show that the optimal property tax rate rises with the ratio of land rents to structure and land development costs. California’s high ratio of income to property tax revenue and the distribution of Federal housing subsidies thus appear geographically misplaced. Proportional taxation of...

This paper analyzes the effects of land use constraints on housing prices. We provide a new framework for evaluating policy when mobility across regions is allowed but limited. A key result is that loosening regulatory constraints within individual regions would have little effect on prices for...

Advancing annuity demand theory, we present sufficient conditions for the optimality of full annuitization under market completeness which are substantially less restrictive than those used by Menahem E. Yaari (1965). We examine demand with market incompleteness, finding that positive...

This paper advances the theory of annuity demand. First, we derive sufficient conditions under which complete annuitization is optimal, showing that this well-known result holds true in a more general setting than in Yaari (1965). Specifically, when markets are complete, sufficient conditions...

Dense, expensive, litigious, and highly regulated, Manhattan typifies coastal US housing markets. Manhattan has lost share of US residential construction over the last 45 years. Some attribute this trend to tightening local regulation, but the decline of public housing construction and the...