Tax and Public Finance
Paper Session
Friday, Jan. 6, 2023 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (CST)
- Chair: Gary Painter, University of Southern California
Do Foreign Buyer Taxes Affect House Prices?
Abstract
This paper studies the impact of foreign buyer taxes on house prices using recent law changes in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Counterfactual house prices are estimated for each treated location combining prediction techniques from machine learning with inference methods from the Synthetic Control Method literature. In general, foreign buyer taxes have negative, large, and persistent effects on house price growth. We find bigger effects in locations with bigger taxes and with higher immigrant shares. Alternative outcome variables, including population growth, GDP growth, and unemployment rates were either unaffected or slightly affected in ways that do not confound our results.Industrial Land Discount in China: A Public Finance Perspective
Abstract
China’s land market features a substantial industrial discount: industrialzoned land is an order of magnitude cheaper than residential land. In contrast to explanations centered on subsidies to industry or promoting industry growth, we emphasize the importance of future tax revenues from the land and find that local public finance incentives can largely rationalize this price gap. Under the “land finance” system, land sales are an important source of revenues for Chinese local governments. We show that local governments, who serve as monopolistic land sellers in China, face a trade-off between supplying residential or industrial land that is determined by the different time profiles of revenues from industrial and residential land sales, local governments’ financial constraints, and the extent of local governments’ tax revenue sharing with other levels of government.Property Tax Sales, Private Capital, and Gentrification in the U.S.
Abstract
Local governments recover revenues from overdue tax bills by auctioning off super senior claims to homes at semi-annual tax lien or tax deed sales. I construct a new nationwide registry of local tax sales to examine how property tax delinquencies facilitate institutional real estate investment in major U.S. metro areas, and the effects of these acquisitions on neighborhood composition and housing disparities. Using detailed data on over 18,000 tax lien sales linked to owners’ overdue tax payment histories, I document tax liens sell at a much larger haircut than mortgage foreclosed homes – for less than 10% of ex ante assessed value in the vast majority of cases. Prices of homes neighboring a tax lien sale property, on average, decline within the first two years of the sale. However, in gentrifying areas, large positive pricing spillovers emerge within three years, driven by investors’ conversion of former tax lien properties into luxury housing and commercial amenities. Underrepresented minority homeowners are more likely to be displaced by tax delinquency and less likely to transact homes in areas containing recent tax sales to institutional buyers. Private capital’s entry into the municipal finance ecosystem has amplified gentrification and the within-city Black-white wealth gap.Discussant(s)
Lei Ding
,
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Wenli Li
,
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Xi Yang
,
University of North Texas
Amanda Ross
,
University of Alabama
JEL Classifications
- R5 - Regional Government Analysis