Tax assessments are regressive with respect to house price for owner-occupied single-family homes in the United States, translating to higher effective tax rates for owners of cheaper homes (Amornsiripanitch 2024; McMillen & Singh 2019). I study whether this regressive property tax structure leads to worse outcomes for these households using a panel of property tax liabilities and transactions for all owner-occupied housing units in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Using Mecklenburg’s seven-year reassessment cycle to capture large changes in tax assessment values, I find that bottom-quartile homes sell at an 18 percent discount and see 64 percent more foreclosure filings two-to-three years after a reassessment, on average. I instrument for effective tax rates with years from reassessment to capture the share of the reassessment effect attributable to the property tax regressivity. I find that over half of the effects on sales prices and foreclosure filings can be explained by differences in effective tax rate changes post-reassessment. The effect is not driven by local unemployment cycles nor housing market trends specific to all bottom quartile-homes, suggesting that differential property tax burdens disproportionately affect owners of cheaper homes.
I study whether the Opportunity Zones (OZ) program, the largest place-based developer subsidy in U.S. history, generated net new housing supply or merely redistributed construction across space and time. Using a quarterly panel of residential address counts for all U.S. census tracts from 2012 to 2022, I estimate inverse-probability-weighted difference-in-differences models using nearby non-OZ tracts following Abadie (2005). A naive baseline comparison yields a marginally positive treatment effect, consistent with headline estimates in prior work, but reflects two redistribution mechanisms rather than genuine new construction. First, residential address growth slowed in the window preceding QOF opening, as developers apparently waited for formal eligibility before breaking ground, an anticipation effect that artificially depresses the pre-treatment baseline. Second, non-OZ tracts within ten miles of a designated zone experienced a symmetrical decline in address growth after OZs opened, indicating that investment relocated across census-tract boundaries rather than expanding net supply. The net effect of OZ designation on housing supply is statistically and economically indistinguishable from zero once both mechanisms are accounted for, casting doubt on the efficacy of the proposed expansion of OZ-style incentives in the One Big Beautiful Budget Act for stimulating new housing production absent complementary zoning or infrastructure reform.
This paper investigates the capacity of large language models (LLMs) to approximate the elasticity of taxable income (ETI), a central parameter in public finance. Using simulations of controlled experiments and replications of studies using observational data, we evaluate how LLMs respond to tax schedule changes. Our results show that LLMs reproduce key behavioral patterns observed in human studies, though often with heightened responsiveness, suggesting limited recognition of real-world frictions. Findings suggest LLMs' potential as low-cost, flexible complements to traditional methods for analyzing taxpayer behavior and policy design, although further validation across models and contexts is needed.
Using retailer scanner data, we examine the impact of a six-month ban on the sale of flavored e-cigarettes in Washington state on tobacco product purchases. Utilizing a differences-in-differences research design, we find that aggregate e-cigarette sales within Washington decrease by nearly 43% during the ban period. Nevertheless, cross-jurisdictional shopping blunts the efficacy of the ban: e-cigarette sales occurring in Oregon and Idaho counties on the Washington border increase by nearly 48% and 17%, respectively. Moreover, cigarette sales in Washington increase by over 10% while the ban is in place. After the ban, cross-border shopping stops, and e-cigarette sales in Washington state quickly recover. The results indicate the need for an approach to tobacco control that accounts for inter-jurisdictional shopping behavior as well as substitution between types of tobacco products.
I examine whether the Opportunity Zones (OZ) program affected rental housing affordability in designated tracts. Place-based development subsidies can affect rents through competing channels: increased investment that expands rental supply and dampens rents, or increased local demand that bids them up. Using a propensity-score-matched difference-in-differences design, I compare rents in OZ tracts to observationally similar non-designated low-income communities (LICs) before and after the program's 2018 opening, controlling for pre-period differences in poverty, employment, rent growth, and home values. Drawing on tract-level data from the American Community Survey, I find no statistically or economically meaningful change in median rents attributable to OZ designation over the 2018–2022 period. The null result is consistent with a literature finding that OZ investment concentrated in high-end real estate rather than expanding affordable rental supply, and suggests the program's tax incentive structure — which rewards capital gains deferral rather than housing output — is poorly suited to improving affordability for zone residents.