Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

The tax treatment of homeowners and landlords and the progressivity of income taxation

Contents:

Author Info

  • Matthew Chambers
  • Carlos Garriga
  • Don Schlagenhauf

Abstract

This paper analyzes the connection between the asymmetric tax treatment of homeowners and landlords and the progressivity of income taxation using a quantitative overlapping generations general equilibrium model with housing and rental markets. Our model emphasizes the determinants of tenure choice (owning versus renting) and the household decision to supply housing services to the rental market. This formulation breaks the link between the rental price and the equilibrium interest rate. Hence, the aggregate supply of rental property responds differently to the direction of rental price changes, marginal tax rate changes, and maintenance cost changes. We show that the model replicates the key factors and the distributional patterns of ownership, house size, and landlords. The degree of progressivity in the income tax code has important implications for housing tenure and housing consumption. We find that a movement toward a less progressive income tax code can generate sizable increases in homeownership and welfare that result from the equilibrium effects and a portfolio reallocation mechanism absent in economies with single assets (e.g., Conesa and Krueger 2006). We find that the removal of existing asymmetries in the tax code has effects on housing that differ from those reported in the literature. We show that housing policy can increase the ownership rate of a particular segment of the population but generate nontrivial distributional costs. The welfare increases are no larger than those found when the progressivity of the tax code is reduced.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.frbatlanta.org/filelegacydocs/wp0806.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in its series Working Paper with number 2008-06.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: 2008
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:fip:fedawp:2008-06

Contact details of provider:
Postal: 1000 Peachtree St., N.E., Atlanta, Georgia 30309
Phone: 404-521-8500
Email:
Web page: http://www.frbatlanta.org/
More information through EDIRC

Order Information:
Email:

Related research

Keywords: Home ownership ; Taxation;

Other versions of this item:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Juan Carlos Conesa & Dirk Krueger, 2005. "On the Optimal Progressivity of the Income Tax Code," CFS Working Paper Series 2005/10, Center for Financial Studies.
  2. Rosen, Harvey S & Rosen, Kenneth T, 1980. "Federal Taxes and Homeownership: Evidence from Time Series," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 88(1), pages 59-75, February.
  3. Gervais, Martin, 2002. "Housing taxation and capital accumulation," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(7), pages 1461-1489, October.
  4. José-Víctor Ríos-Rull & Virginia Sánchez-Marcos, 2008. "An Aggregate Economy with Different Size Houses," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(2-3), pages 705-714, 04-05.
  5. Yoshiro Miwa & Matthew Chambers & Carlos Garriga & Don E. Schlagenhauf, 2004. "Accounting for Changes in the Homeownership Rate," CIRJE F-Series CIRJE-F-312, CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.
  6. Castañeda, A. & Díaz-Giménez, Javier & Ríos-Rull, J.V., . "Accounting for the U.S. Earnings and Wealth Inequality," Open Access publications from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid info:hdl:10016/4959, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
  7. James Berkovec & Don Fullerton, 1993. "A General Equilibrium Model of Housing, Taxes, and Portfolio Choice," NBER Working Papers 3505, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  8. Edgar O. Olsen, 2001. "Housing Programs for Low-Income Households," NBER Working Papers 8208, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  9. Henderson, J Vernon & Ioannides, Yannis M, 1983. "A Model of Housing Tenure Choice," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(1), pages 98-113, March.
  10. Henderson, J. Vernon & Ioannides, Yannis M., 1989. "Dynamic aspects of consumer decisions in housing markets," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(2), pages 212-230, September.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Jonathan Halket & Santhanagopalan Vasudev, 2012. "Home Ownership, Savings, and Mobility Over The Life Cycle," Economics Discussion Papers 712, University of Essex, Department of Economics.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedawp:2008-06

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Diane Rosenberger).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.