Leverage and Taxes: Evidence from the Real Estate Industry

Finance theory has long viewed corporate income taxes as a potentially important determinant of corporate financing decisions and capital structures. But finance academics have been unable to provide convincing empirical evidence of a material effect of taxes on corporate leverage, in part because of difficulties in constructing an effective proxy for marginal corporate tax rates, and hence for the tax benefits of debt, for large samples of individual companies. The authors address this by analyzing leverage decisions in an industry whose publicly traded entities are organized either as taxable corporations, or as real estate investment trusts (REITs) that effectively avoid entity level taxation. This enables them to measure the relative tax benefits of debt with greater precision while controlling for important nontax characteristics that affect debt usage. The tax hypothesis predicts that for real estate firms with similar asset portfolios, taxable firms should have more debt than their nontaxable counterparts. Both the nontaxable and the taxable real estate firms in our sample routinely have more than twice the leverage of industrial firms, which suggests that factors other than taxes are contributing to their use of debt. But among real estate firms, tax status appears to play a much weaker role. Taxable firms have significantly more leverage only after 2000, when restrictions on REITs were removed through new regulations that made their operations much more like those of taxable real estate firms. Our findings also depend on real estate characteristics—most notably, only residential real estate firms demonstrated differences that are consistent with the tax hypothesis. Taken together, the authors’ findings suggest that although taxes do seem to matter, their role is clearly secondary relative to factors such as the nature of the firm’s assets. A generous interpretation of our evidence puts the effect of taxes between one‐third and one‐half of that implied by prior research.     

The optimal inheritance tax in the presence of investment in education

This paper provides an example aimed at calculating the optimal inheritance tax in a model in which inheritances are used to finance investment in education. Two results are obtained: (1) The optimal inheritance tax schedule includes a threshold, estimated between 2.5 and 5.5 times per-capita GDP. This result holds for a Rawlsian social planner that maximizes the welfare of the poorest individual, who does not leave bequests. (2) Contrary to the result of a 100 % tax on pure accidental bequests, the optimal simulated tax rates are between 28 %, for the case of educational bequests, and 57 %, for the case where educational and accidental bequests interact. This range is in line with existing schedules in developed economies.     

Attitudes towards Tax Levels: A Multi‐Tax Comparison*

We analyse Swedes' opinions about the levels of 11 different taxes to see which taxes people are most averse to and why. The most unpopular tax is the real estate tax, while the corporate tax is the least unpopular. We find a strong self‐interest effect in tax attitudes and that knowledge and education increase support for corrective taxes.     

对个人住房开征物业税的几个判断及效应预测

对个人住房开征物业税是关乎国计民生的大事。本文认为,开征物业税之前需要进一步理顺中央与地方的财政关系;开征后的物业税收入要用于满足地方公共财政支出的需要;物业税开征后的征管质量取决于对个人住房信息的掌握和政府各部门间的横向合作。物业税开征与地区房地产价格弱相关,与全国房地产价格无关;与股市题材炒作相关,与资本市场发育无关;与当地居民收入和福利相关,与辖区外居民效用无关。     

重视房地产持有环节税的作用 积极推进房地产税制改革

开征房地产持有环节税①是我国财政体制改革的一项重要内容。本文探讨了现阶段在我国开征房地产持有环节税可以实现的政策目标:构建地方税主体税种,完善分税制财政体制;调节居民收入分配和财富存量,缩小贫富差距;稳定房地产价格,促进房地产市场健康发展;促进节约利用土地资源,保护耕地红线;缓和购房压力,促进一般性消费增长,优化消费结构。     

论我国房地产税制改革的目标与途径

随着房地产市场的发展,尤其是房地产价格的不断上涨,期望通过税收工具抑制房价的呼声越来越强烈。本文认为,房地产价格的上涨是一种长期趋势,税收对房地产市场的调控应注意把握调控时机和调控力度。从税收政策目标看,不应以打压房价为目标,而应以促进房地产市场健康、有序发展为目标,并应在课税对象、税制结构、税负水平和征收管理上进行重新设计,最终建立起全新的、健全的房地产税收体系。     

存量房交易计税价格批量评估典型技术路线比较

针对我国存量房交易中存在的买卖双方低报交易价格问题,税务部门提出应将评税技术应用于房地产交易计税价格核定。丹东、杭州、南京作为试点城市建立了各自的存量房交易计税价格批量评估体系,其他城市可以学习和借鉴这三个城市的经验,再结合本地房地产市场情况,建立符合本地实际的应用房地产估价技术评估存量房交易价格申报工作的路径与方法。房地产评税技术的完善,一方面可以打击当前存量房交易中普遍存在的用“阴阳合同”逃避交易税费的行为;另一方面可以为正在推进的房产税改革以及住房保有环节征税等提供技术支持。     

Debt and taxes: Evidence from the real estate industry

Compelling empirical evidence documenting a material effect of corporate taxes on leverage decisions is limited, in part because of difficulties in constructing an effective proxy for the firm's tax benefit of debt. We examine leverage decisions across taxable and nontaxable real estate firms—firms for which we can measure the relative tax benefit of debt with little error. The tax hypothesis implies that for firms with similar asset portfolios, taxable firms should have more debt than their nontaxable counterparts. Consistent with this, leverage ratios of taxable real estate firms are higher than their nontaxable counterparts, but the magnitude of this difference is at most one-half of that implied by studies that employ simulated marginal tax rates.     

Pareto-improving bequest taxation

Altruistic parents may transfer resources to their offspring by providing education, and by leaving bequests. We show that in the presence of wage taxation, a small bequest tax may improve efficiency in an overlapping-generations framework with only intended bequests, by enhancing incentives of parents to invest in their children’s education. We also calculate an optimal mix of wage and bequest taxes with alternative parameter combinations. In all cases, the optimal wage tax rate is clearly higher than the optimal bequest tax rate, but the latter is generally positive when the required government revenue in the economy is sufficiently high. If educational investment is partly unobservable for the government, these results qualitatively hold also when allowing for education subsidies.     

房地产税收的一般经济分析

房地产税作为地方政府理想的收入来源,对于实质性财政分权制度的建立具有非常重要的作用。关于房地产税的税负归宿问题,理论界存在三种不同的观点。但这三种观点并不是相互排斥的,在不同的情况下,每种观点可能都是有效的。按照现代资产定价理论,房地产税收通过改变住宅投资的预期增值,从而影响住宅资产价格的走势。     

A Note on the Tax Treatment of Private Pensions and Individual Savings Accounts

The UK government is planning to introduce stakeholder pensions from April 2001 as an alternative to existing personal pensions for people on moderate earnings. But stakeholder pensions are only one way to save for retirement; the new tax‐free Individual Savings Account (ISA) is another. This note compares the tax treatments of pensions and ISAs and assesses the conditions under which the tax treatment of private pensions is more generous than that of an ISA to a basicrate taxpayer – the typical target for stakeholder pensions. The abolition of dividend tax credits paid to pension funds in July 1997 reduced the relatively tax‐favoured position of pensions, but the tax‐free lump sum means that private pensions continue to be a tax‐favoured form of saving at most reasonable rates of return. We show that employer contributions to private pensions are particularly tax‐favoured.     

房地产税收调控政策的效应分析与建议

本文梳理了2005年以来国家针对房地产投资规模过大和部分城市住房价格上涨过快状况而出台的多项税收调控措施,并通过理论和实证分析认为,房地产税收调控政策的重点应从目前对供给方征税转向对需求方征税,即在房地产保有环节征税。为此,应尽快建立起全面准确的房地产信息资料和监控系统,加快推进物业税(不动产税)的改革。     

房地产税收结构与房价关系的研究

近些年,房价问题引起社会普遍关注。本文通过建立面板数据模型,研究了不同地区的房地产税收对房价的影响。研究表明房地产税收对房价有影响,但各个税种在不同地区的影响效果和贡献度不同。因此,差别化房地产税收制度结构是当前房地产市场调控的关键。     

Real estate transfer taxes and property values: The Philadelphia story

We examine the effect of the 1988 increase in the Philadelphia real estate transfer tax on the sale price of residential property. We find that sales prices fell, as expected. While sampling variability is slightly higher than desirable, the point estimate of the key coefficient indicates a decrease in house price far greater than what would be expected with perfect capital markets. This may be attributed to either capital market imperfections or the news value of the tax increase. The burden of the transfer tax thus rests on the seller.     

我国慈善捐赠税收政策体系的完善研究

近年来,我国慈善捐赠事业不断发展,但与之相关的慈善捐赠税收政策较为分散,尚未形成完整的政策体系。梳理我国慈善捐赠相关税收政策法规发现,我国慈善捐赠税收政策体系目前存在较多问题亟待解决。进一步完善我国现行慈善捐赠税收政策体系,需要借鉴国际经验,从全局考虑,统筹规划各税种的税收优惠政策,使各税种的优惠政策和税收征管共同作用,充分保障捐赠者和受赠者权益,从而更好促进我国慈善捐赠事业发展。     

What is the After‐Tax Price of R&D? An Interstate Comparison*

As of 2005, 31 US states offered corporate income tax credits on research and development (R&D) expenses in order to encourage more in‐state innovation activities. Empirical questions about the efficacy of such tax breaks at the state level persist, in part because the complexity of the tax laws means that simple credit‐rate comparisons across states do not fully capture the differential variation in effective after‐tax price incentives firms face in choosing where to locate R&D activities. We are unaware of any research analysing and comparing the effective prices of R&D faced by firms, across all US states and utilising micro‐level data. Using data extracted from detailed reading of individual firms' 10‐K and S‐1 filings and of state‐level tax credit rules, we estimate the effective after‐tax price of basic and qualified research expenditure each firm would have faced in each of the 50 states had they been located there. Our methodology simulates the effective tax price of each firm's marginal dollar of research expenditure, assuming the firm chose to move all of its R&D operations to each of the 49 other states. Through Monte Carlo techniques, we consider the sensitivity of our interstate comparative results to several modelling assumptions. We find significant variation in after‐tax R&D prices across states with quite different R&D tax laws. Prices range from $0.176 to $0.520 on a marginal dollar of R&D in Virginia and Washington State, respectively. We also find that the interstate variability is generally more important – indeed, much wider than we had anticipated before investigating state‐by‐state regulations – than the inter‐firm variability within states.     

Avoiding Taxes at Any Cost: The Economics of Tax-Deferred Real Estate Exchanges

This study examines the role tax-deferred exchanges play in the determination of reservation and transaction prices in U.S. commercial real estate markets. Taxpayers face significant time constraints when seeking to complete a delayed tax-deferred exchange. In a perfectly competitive market, a weakened bargaining position would not affect the transaction price. However, in illiquid, highly segmented commercial real estate markets, the exchanger may be required to pay a premium for the acquired property relative to its fair market value. Using a unique and rich dataset of commercial property transactions, we find that tax-motivated exchange buyers pay significantly more, on average, than non-exchange investors for their apartment and office properties, all else equal. Moreover, these average price premiums generally exceed the tax deferral benefits investors obtain by the use of a tax-deferred exchange. This result is robust to a number of alternative specifications. Thus, for many investors the pursuit of tax avoidance comes at a steep price.     

试析我国开征房产税的目标取向

开征房产税引起了社会各界的广泛关注，但对一些根本性问题尚未有正确的认识，特剐是对其目标取向的认识仍然存在很大的误区。现在普遍认为我国开征房产税是为了降低房地产价格和国家获得不断增加的级差地租。本文认为。正确合理的目标取向应该是落实科学发展观，以促进土地科学合理地规划开发、土地使用的节约和金融风险的降低。     

The Neighborhood Effect of Real Estate Maintenance

We investigate the economics of real estate investment when maintenance of a property enhances neighborhood value. Because a property owner does not recognize this positive externality for his/her neighbor, he/she under-maintains. Smaller properties benefit most from this externality. We show that subsidizing the maintenance expenses of properties can induce socially optimal maintenance. Without disturbing social optimality, the maintenance subsidy can be financed with either a flat tax or a tax that is proportional to the land value or the cost of the improvement. The flat tax is less costly. Commonly used subsidies in the real estate industry based on loan guarantees do not promote socially optimal maintenance.     

Thinking and Learning in the Tax Evasion Game

Equilibrium behaviour is one of the fundamental concepts of economics: that each player's strategy is a best response to their beliefs about other players' strategies (and that these beliefs are realised). It is therefore striking that one of the most utilised economic models of tax compliance (Allingham and Sandmo, 1972) lacks this property as random audit selection is not a best response for the tax administration. The game theory literature of tax compliance has solved the equilibrium under assumptions of perfect information, full rationality and representative agents (Reinganum and Wilde, 1986; Erard and Feinstein, 1994). The recent application of behavioural economics to tax compliance (Hashimzade et al., 2014) allows richer assumptions such as heterogeneity and asymmetric information to be included in agent‐based models. This paper investigates the tax administration's best‐response audit strategy with heterogeneous taxpayers, imperfect information and evolutionary survival of taxpayers. It finds that, under these conditions, the tax administration's best‐response audit strategy is an adaptive learning approach and not a well‐defined audit function. This fits with actual practice of ‘predictive analytics’ by OECD tax administrations. Behavioural game theory also predicts that when actors are information rich, adaptive learning will dominate abstract thinking.