Winners and Losers from Property Taxation

<div>This paper considers optimal taxation of housing capital. To this end, we employ a life-cycle model calibrated to the U.S. economy, where asset holdings and labor productivity vary across households, and tax reforms lead to changes in house and rental prices, interest rates, and wages. We find that the optimal property tax in the long run is considerably higher than today, partly due to the relatively inelastic demand and supply of housing. A higher property tax also reduces house prices and causes a reallocation from housing to business capital, which in turn decreases interest rates and increases wages. These equilibrium effects allow for an improved consumption smoothing over the life cycle. However, most current households would incur substantial welfare losses from an implementation of a higher property tax, since house prices fall, and a majority own their home.Hence, when accounting for transitional dynamics, it is not clear that a higher property tax is feasible or preferred.</div>

本文研究住房资本的最优征税问题。为此，我们采用校准至美国经济的生命周期模型——该模型中家庭间的资产持有量与劳动生产率存在差异，且税收改革会引发房价、租金价格、利率及工资的变动。研究发现，长期最优财产税显著高于当前水平，部分原因在于住房供需相对缺乏弹性。提高财产税还会降低房价，并促使资源从住房领域向商业资本领域重新配置，进而压低利率、推高工资。这些均衡效应有助于改善生命周期内的消费平滑性。然而，由于房价下跌且多数家庭拥有自住房，当前多数家庭会因提高财产税的实施而遭受显著福利损失。因此，考虑到转型动态时，提高财产税是否可行或可取尚不明确。