ارزیابی ارزش بازار و ریسک هزینه ـ مالیات غیرمتعارف: درک عواقب ناشی از تعاریف جایگزین از پایه مالیات بر دارایی

I develop a framework, based on tax price, which measures the distributional consequences of any alternative property tax base definition. Using administrative data, I show that defining tax base as market value produces large amounts of idiosyncratic tax-price risk. I show that an assessment limit can reduce the tax-price risk generated by the market value definition and that the benefits of the assessment limit vary over time and accrue to a majority of taxpayers. In addition, I argue that the tax-price framework is appropriate for estimating behavioral responses to alternative tax base definitions.

Around the world, the property tax is an important source of national and subnational government revenues and the scope of the tax is expanding with the recent introduction of new property taxes in China and Greece.1 In the United States, the property tax remains the largest independent source of local government revenues and as such provides local governments with the discretion over revenues and expenditures that forms the backbone of the U.S. fiscal federal system.

In a property tax system, the choice of the definition of the property tax base determines the current distribution of the property tax burden and expectations about the future distribution of the property tax burden. In this paper, I present a framework for measuring the direct consequences of alternative tax base definitions for the distribution of the current and future property tax burden. The consequences are direct because I measure them in the absence of behavioral responses. This framework is general; it can be used to understand the consequences of a wide variety of alternative tax base definitions. Unlike previous measures, this new framework is based on tax prices and is thus able to separate the effect of alternative tax base definitions from the effects of across-jurisdiction differences in tax revenues and tax rates. This new measure is based on a well-defined economic question and it is the first to consider the implications of the choice of tax base definitions for the distribution of future property tax burdens under uncertainty. I show that understanding the consequences of alternative tax base definitions under uncertainty requires a focus on the mean, variance, and covariance of future tax prices as well as the share of tax-price variation that is common rather than idiosyncratic.