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Report
Housing busts and household mobility: an update
This paper provides updated estimates of the impact of three financial frictions?negative equity, mortgage lock-in, and property tax lock-in?on household mobility. We add the 2009 wave of the American Housing Survey (AHS) to our sample and also create an improved measure of permanent moves in response to Schulhofer-Wohl?s (2011) critique of our earlier work (2010). Our updated estimates corroborate our previous results: Negative equity reduces household mobility by 30 percent, and $1,000 of additional mortgage or property tax costs reduces household mobility by 10 to 16 percent. ...
Working Paper
Liquidity problems and early payment default among subprime mortgages
The lack of property tax escrow accounts among subprime mortgages causes borrowers to make large lump-sum tax payments that reduce liquidity. Different property tax collection dates across states and counties create exogenous variation in the time between loan origination and the first property tax due date, affording the opportunity to estimate the causal effect of loan-level exposure to liquidity reductions on mortgage default. We find that a nine-month delay in owing property taxes reduces the probability of first-year default by about 4 percent, or about one-third of the effect of a ...
Journal Article
Spirit of 13
Journal Article
Does business development raise taxes?
Speech
Impact of the Great Recession on public schools in the region
Remarks at the Quarterly Regional Economic Press Briefing, New York City.
Journal Article
The effect of Proposition 13 on California municipal debt
Journal Article
Proposition 13 - genesis and consequences
Working Paper
The effect of state fiscal reform on population heterogeneity
This paper tests whether state fiscal policy alters neighborhood income homogeneity. One implication of the Tiebout model is that within-community homogeneity declines as a result of an exogenous decrease in the ability of jurisdictions to set local tax and expenditure levels. The Property tax revolt and the school finance equalization reform of the 1970s and 1980s offer a test of the role of state fiscal reform on aggregate population sorting behavior. The results show that fiscal reform, especially tax and expenditure limitation laws and property tax reform, results in a small but ...
Working Paper
Property taxes and elderly mobility
The recent housing market boom in the U.S. has caused sharp increases in residential property taxes. Housing-rich but income-poor elderly homeowners often complain about rising tax burdens, and anecdotal evidence suggests that some move to reduce their tax burden. There has been little systematic analysis, however, of the link between property tax levels and the mobility rate of elderly homeowners. This paper investigates this link using household-level panel data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and a newly collected dataset on state-provided property tax relief programs. These ...