پاسخ رفتاری به مالیات انتقال مسکن: شواهد از یک تغییر پیمانه در سیاست دی سی

This paper estimates the behavioral response to residential real estate transfer taxes by studying notched tax rate changes in Washington D.C., exploiting both a price and time notch as identifying variation. We provide evidence that there is manipulation of the sales price to the lower-tax-rate region around the price notch, and use this manipulation to show that there was significant awareness of the tax changes and the incentives they created. We then construct difference-in-difference estimates to examine whether there is a lock-in effect in the volume of house sales away from the price and time notches; we find no evidence of a lock-in effect in this setting. Taken together, our results suggest that the welfare costs of a state introducing or eliminating a housing transaction tax are small.