Job Market Paper
Hurricane Sandy and New York City's Property Tax Base
Invited presentations: NTA 116th Annual Conference (2023), Camp Resources XXX (2024), WUSTL 19th Graduate Student Conference (2024)
The property tax is an essential source of revenue for local governments in the United States. One of the greatest benefits of this tax is the immobility of property and infrastructure, making it one of the least volatile local taxes. Climate change may threaten this stability by damaging property and updating perceptions of risk. Using data from New York City, I provide causal estimates of the effect of hurricane Sandy on assessed values. I find that assessments decline by 10.3 percent in the flood zone in the 10 years following the storm indicating a reduction in the size of the tax base. The reduction in assessed value among flooded properties also suggests that there was a shift in the tax burden away from high-risk properties which may lessen the impact of future storms and/or sea-level rise. Effects are largest for properties with low sale prices prior to the storm and properties located in Staten Island. The city’s cap on assessed values contributes to the persistence of these effects.
Working Paper
Wayfair: A Step Towards the Destination, But Sales Tax Competition Remains
NBER Working Paper 31074
with William F. Fox and Donald Bruce
The US Supreme Court decision in the landmark 2018 Wayfair case greatly improved state governments’ ability to enforce collection of sales taxes on a destination basis. This has reduced state tax competition with an essentially untaxed internet, but has brought traditional cross-border shopping, which is often subject to origin taxation, back to prominence among policy makers and researchers. We provide a detailed discussion of state and local sales tax features and the extent to which they have fostered sales tax competition in recent decades. We then explore the extent to which greater destination taxation has influenced the location of (a) consumer purchases and (b) business locations using two different empirical approaches. First, we analyze county-level data for Tennessee and select surrounding states to provide suggestive evidence that sales tax collections have grown more in rural Tennessee counties and less in Tennessee border counties since Wayfair. Additionally, we show that collections have grown more since Wayfair in North Carolina counties along the Tennessee border, where the tax rate differential is on the order of three percentage points. Second, we examine state-level data to show that business applications have grown at much faster rates after Wayfair in states with the highest sales tax rates. We attribute this to the removal of the significant disincentive to establish sales tax nexus that dominated the pre-Wayfair environment.
Works in Progress
Nudging Away Disparities in Homestead Exemption Take-up Rates (with Luke Rodgers)
Cross-border Shopping in a post-Wayfair World: Evidence from foot-traffic data
Invited presentation: ASSA 2025 Annual Meeting
Policy Reports and Other Publications
Illinois Adult Use Cannabis Industry Disparity Study (2024) with Elizabeth A. Stanton, Bryndis Woods, Tanya Stasio, Jordan Burt, Deja Garraway, and Nayantara Biswas.
Economic Report to the Governor, 2024 (2023) with Lawrence M. Kessler, Donald J. Bruce, Tim Kuhn, Seth Neller, and Alex S. Norwood.
Economic Report to the Governor, 2023 (2022) with Lawrence M. Kessler, Donald J. Bruce, Tim Kuhn, Seth Neller, and Edward L. Taylor.
Economic Development Plan for the Governor of Tennessee (2021) with Lawrence M. Kessler, Matt Harris, William F. Fox, Donald J. Bruce, Celeste Carruthers, and Richard Beem.
A Deep Dive on South Carolina’s Property Tax System: Complex, Inequitable, and Uncompetitive (2020) with Camila Alvayay Torrejón, John E. Anderson, Michael Bell, Daphne A. Kenyon, David Merriman, Semida Munteanu, Bethany P. Paquin, and Mark Skidmore. Prepared for The South Carolina Chamber of Commerce and Realtor’s Association. Prepared for The South Carolina Chamber of Commerce and Realtor’s Association. Online Report: https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/other/deep-dive-south-carolinas-property-tax.