The effect of property taxes on urban areas

The effects of property taxes on urban areas are studied relative to a local wage tax. The changes in urban population and in the consumption and price of housing are determined in cities with various types of production sectors. Distortions in the composition of housing and residential density patterns are also reported. Examples are constructed to quantify the size of the changes and test whether property taxes are capitalized into land values.     

State and local tax competition in a spatial model with sales taxes and residential property taxes

This paper presents a theoretical model with a uniformly populated line that is divided into local jurisdictions (and/or states). If one level of government imposes sales and residential property taxes, and if the spatial extent of each taxing jurisdiction is positive and finite, then (in Nash equilibrium) the sales tax rate is less than residential property tax rate, housing consumption is suboptimal, and the public good is underprovided in each jurisdiction. If a very large state (or country) is divided into local jurisdictions, and if both levels of government choose tax rates endogenously, then under some assumptions there is an efficient outcome.     

The effect of property taxes on vacation home growth rates: Evidence from Michigan

The Tiebout model assumes that individuals sort to the jurisdiction which best matches their fiscal preferences. However, there is a paucity of reliable estimates for the impact of tax changes on household mobility. We utilize a state mandated school finance reform and temporal differences in vacation home densities to provide a unique test of this fundamental Tiebout assumption. The results show that changes in property taxes explain a significant amount of the variation in vacation home growth; a 3–4 mil decrease in property tax rates is associated with an increase of approximately one vacation home per square kilometer.     

Soft budgets and hard rents: a note on Kornai and Gomulka

This note shows how Kornai's concept of the soft budget constraint can be decomposed into separate elements of technical inefficiency and relative price distortion. The distinction between r-budget softness and m-budget softness introduced by Gomulka is shown to correspond to the equivalent and compensating variation measures of efficiency loss. It is also argued that budget softness should be viewed as the outcome of a rent-seeking process in which a firm's action in the control sphere incurs an opportunity cost in the real sphere. Adopting such a perspective leads to a re-definition of the resource loss associated with budget softness and results in much higher estimates of the social costs of soft budgets than those proposed in the existing literature.     

Why truck distance taxes are contagious and drive fuel taxes to the bottom

This paper analyzes the way in which countries with international and local truck traffic decide to switch from a simple fuel tax system to a dual system of fuel and distance charge taxes. We show what drives a country to switch and how this affects the level of fuel taxes as well as incentives for other countries to also adopt the dual system. The model is partially able to explain the gradual extension of kilometer charging for trucks in Europe. The model also shows that, in the absence of diesel cars, the gradual introduction of kilometer charges will make fuel taxation for trucks virtually disappear and will lead to a system where truck use is (1) taxed mainly based on distance, (2) is taxed too heavily, and (3) where highest distance taxes are expected in transit countries with a strong market position. When the fuel tax must in addition serve as an externality tax for diesel cars, the introduction of distance charges for trucks will give rise to diesel taxes that are lower than the external cost of diesel cars. For trucks, this leads to a sum of diesel taxes and distance charges that are higher than the external cost of trucks.     

General equilibrium and optimal taxes

It is shown that if subsidies are not excessive, there exists a general competitive equilibrium in the presence of a complex tax structure. Furthermore, under certain continuity assumptions, a tax structure which is optimal from the social point of view can be determined. Procedures maximize quasi-concave after tax profit functions. Consumers have convex budget sets reflect- ing their income from sales and profits minus taxes on fixed income and progressive sales taxes. Their preferences are interdependent, intransitive and incomplete. The government provides public goods and determines the optimal tax regime on the basis of its preferences on the final competitive consumption allocation.     

The rise of environmentalism, pollution taxes and intra-industry trade

This paper develops a political-economy model to investigate to what extent a rise of environmentalism can successfully encourage higher pollution taxes and reduce pollution. The model focuses on special-interest group politics, intra-industry trade and a transnational environmental externality. The main finding is that a rise of environmentalism is not sufficient to protect the environment when pollution is relatively immobile and environmentalists are concerned with pollution in other countries than their own.Received: January 2004, Accepted: November 2004, JEL Classification: D72, Q28, F12I am grateful to Rolf Bommer, Jan Rose Skaksen, Per Fredriksson and Torsten Persson for comments and suggestions.     

The impact of unemployment insurance taxes on wages

This paper examines the incidence of state unemployment insurance taxes on wages paid to workers in various demographic groups. The empirical work matches state level measures of unemployment insurance tax and benefit variables to data aggregated from the Current Population Survey on worker earnings for the period 1992 to 2002. Econometric evidence presented in the paper supports the paper's main hypothesis that UI tax rate structure has its greatest adverse impact on less mobile workers (prime age married women and young workers) and little impact on more mobile workers (prime age men).     

Optimal investment with taxes: an existence result

We study the deterministic control problem of maximizing utility from consumption of an agent who seeks to optimally allocate his wealth between consumption and investment in a financial asset subject to taxes on benefits with first-in–first-out priority rule on sales. Short sales are prohibited and consumption is restricted to be non-negative. Such a problem has been introduced in a previous paper by the same authors where the first-order conditions have been derived. In this paper, we establish an existence result for this non-classical optimal control problem.     

Income taxes and urban spatial structure

This paper examines the impact of an income tax in a monocentric city where households equilibriate their allocation of time between work, commuting, and leisure. An increase in the income tax rate lowers the implicit value of time, and hence transportation costs. “Compensated equilibrium” comparative statics analysis shows that under certain conditions, this results in a larger, more dispersed urban area, with lower land rents at the city center and less population within any given distance from the center. The welfare effect of an income tax rate change is also studied, and an expression for the marginal excess burden is derived. The income tax produces welfare losses both because it induces substitution in favor of leisure and in favor of travel—the latter accompanied by excessive spatial dispersion and consumption of space. The marginal excess burden depends not only on the compensated demand elasticity for leisure, but also on that for space. Finally, the problem of benefit measurement for transportation projects in this tax-distorted spatial economy is examined. Benefit measures should be deflated to adjust for the fact that further transportation improvements lead to reduction of land use intensity, exacerbating the problem of spatial resource misallocation in an already excessively dispersed urban area.     

Property taxes and urban housing abandonment

This paper formulates and estimates an economic model of landlord housing abandonment, using New York City data. A major focus of the study is to investigate the importance of property taxes in the abandonment decision, as opposed to such factors as the types of buildings or the characteristics of households occupying the neighborhood. There are two major results: first, cities can reduce the rate of abandonment by initiating foreclosure as soon as buildings go into arrears on property tax payments (rather than allowing a grace period), and second, property taxes are an important and significant determinant of abandonment rates. The benefits and costs of a policy whereby cities would systematically reduce property taxes in blighted neighborhoods by lowering assessment levels are also explored.     

Government bailouts and monetary disequilibrium: common fundamentals in the Mexican and East Asian currency crises

Monetary disequilibrium seems to be a common thread that connects the Mexican and East Asian crises. Both crises have been characterized by governments attempting to minimize the adverse impacts of capital reversals on their domestic financial systems. This backstopping function of the monetary authority is modeled within an escape clause-based currency crisis framework which emphasizes the “nonmechanical” behavior of governments as they trade off various economic policy objectives.     

Public spending and optimal taxes without commitment

We consider a representative agent, infinite-horizon economy where production requires private and public capital. The supply of public capital is financed through distortionary taxation. The optimal (second best) tax policy of a benevolent government is time inconsistent. We therefore introduce explicitly the constraint that at no point in time the revision of the original tax plan is desirable. We completely characterize the (third best) tax plan that satisfies this constraint, and estimate the difference in tax rate between the second and third best policy for a wide range of parameters. For some of these the difference between the second and third best tax rates is large, and so are the associated rates of economic growth.     

The effects of taxes and dividend policy on capital accumulation and macroeconomic behavior

This paper analyzes the macrodynamic effects of changes in various tax rates in an intertemporal optimizing framework. Two aspects emphasized include the role of dividend policy and the behavior of the stock market. Both permanent and temporary tax changes are considered, with the transitional adjustment paths being characterized in detail. The contrast between the short-run and long-run effects is highlighted. In particular, an increase in any of the tax rates will cause short-run employment to fall, and with the capital stock fixed instantaneously, the capital-labor ratio immediately rises. Over time, as the capital stock declines, the capital-labor ratio falls.     

Corporate debt,corporate taxes and leasing

This paper utilizes recent developments in capital lease modeling to develop a new specification of the relationship between the expected returns to debt, levered equity and unlevered equity for firms that lease a portion of their assets. Accounting explicitly for leases is shown to be important when the difference between equity and debt risk is large, when the risk of leased assets differs from the firm's other assets and when salvage value is a significant portion of the capitalized value of the firm's lease obligations. This new specification yields improved estimates of firms' unlevered cost of capital, thereby facilitating improved capital budgeting decisions in those that lease a significant portion of their assets.     

The economics of property taxes and land values: The elasticity of supply of structures

Land values are explained by diminishing returns to a variable factor, structure, added to fixed land. The total cost minimizing structural density determined by land value, occurs where the marginal cost of increased density equals the average cost of structure plus land. Structural demand prices equal marginal costs in equilibrium determining land demands. A general equilibrium land price establishes the uses, prices and densities of structures. A simple method of calculating structure supply elasticity and the incidence and deadweight loss of property taxes is developed. Differing property tax rates are found to be efficient.     

The effects of output and factor subsidies or taxes on an urban area

This study investigates the effects of five types of factor and output subsidies upon an urban area. It represents an improvement upon prior regional tax or subsidy analyses since it includes a non-traded good in the urban model. Also, the supply elasticities of the three inputs to production; land, labor, and capital are parameterized, thus increasing the generality of the results. A suggested application of the model is to the study of urban decentralization policies in countries with a low or mid-level of development.     

Vertical integration and first-mover advantages in environmental taxes

This paper analyzes whether vertical integration between firms and suppliers encourages governments to behave as leaders in environmental policies. To study this issue, we consider transboundary pollution and two countries, with one firm in each country. We find that whether governments prefer to be leaders or followers in environmental taxes depends on two factors: whether firms are vertically integrated or not and the degree to which environmental pollution spills over to trading partners. When this overspill takes an intermediate value, taxes are set sequentially under vertical integration, but they are set simultaneously without it.     

Pollution,mortality and time consistent abatement taxes

We study dynamically consistent policy in a neoclassical overlapping generations growth model where pollution externalities undermine health but are mitigated via tax-financed abatement. With arbitrarily constant taxation, two steady states arise: an unstable ‘poverty trap’ and a ‘neoclassical’ steady state near which the dynamics might either be monotonically convergent or oscillating. When the planner chooses a time consistent abatement path that maximizes a weighted intergenerational sum of expected utility, the optimal tax is zero at low levels of capital and then a weakly increasing function of the capital stock. The non-homogeneity of the tax function along with its feedback effect on savings induces additional steady states, stability reversals and oscillations.