IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/3963.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Taxation and Housing: Old Questions, New Answers

Author

Listed:
  • James M. Poterba

Abstract

This paper sketches how the tax reforms of the 1980s affected the incentives and distortions associated with tax policy toward housing markets. There are three principal conclusions. (1) Reductions in marginal tax rates, particularly for high-income households, reduced the tax-induced distortion in the user cost of owner-occupied housing. This lowered the deadweight losses associated with the favorable tax treatment of homeownership. (2) The increase in the standard deduction in the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) removed several million middle-income homeowners who previously itemized from the ranks of itemizers. For these households TRA86 raised the marginal cost of owner-occupied housing. These changes also exacerbated the regressive nature of the mortgage interest subsidy. In 1988, more than half of the tax losses associated with mortgage interest deductions accrued to the 8% of taxpayers with the highest economic incomes. (3) TRA86 reduced incentives for rental housing investment, contributing to the decline in new multifamily housing starts from 500,000 per year in 1985 to less than 150,000 in 1991. In the long-run these policies will lead to higher rents.

Suggested Citation

  • James M. Poterba, 1992. "Taxation and Housing: Old Questions, New Answers," NBER Working Papers 3963, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3963
    Note: PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w3963.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James R. Follain & Patric H. Hendershott & David C. Ling, 1987. "Understanding the Real Estate Provisions of Tax Reform: Motivation and Impact," NBER Working Papers 2289, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Follain, James R. & Ling, David C., 1991. "The Federal Tax Subsidy to Housing and the Reduced Value of the Mortgage Interest Deduction," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 44(2), pages 147-168, June.
    3. James M. Poterba, 1984. "Tax Subsidies to Owner-Occupied Housing: An Asset-Market Approach," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 99(4), pages 729-752.
    4. Follain, James R. & Ling, David C., 1991. "The Federal Tax Subsidy to Housing and the Reduced Value of the Mortgage Interest Deduction," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 44(2), pages 147-68, June.
    5. Berkovec, James & Fullerton, Don, 1992. "A General Equilibrium Model of Housing, Taxes, and Portfolio Choice," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 100(2), pages 390-429, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Anderson, John E. & Roy, Atrayee Ghosh, 2001. "Eliminating Housing Tax Preferences: A Distributional Analysis," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 41-58, March.
    2. Serena Fatica & Doris Prammer, 2018. "Housing and the Tax System: How Large Are the Distortions in the Euro Area?," Fiscal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 39(2), pages 299-342, June.
    3. Hanson, Andrew, 2012. "Size of home, homeownership, and the mortgage interest deduction," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(3), pages 195-210.
    4. Hal Martin, 2018. "The Impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on Local Home Values," Working Papers (Old Series) 1806, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    5. Poterba, James M. & Sinai, Todd, 2011. "Revenue Costs and Incentive Effects of the Mortgage Interest Deduction for Owner-Occupied Housing," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 64(2), pages 531-564, June.
    6. Todd Sinai & Joseph Gyourko, 2004. "The (Un)changing Geographical Distribution of Housing Tax Benefits: 1980–2000," NBER Chapters, in: Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 18, pages 175-208, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Rodriguez, J. & Barrios, J., 2004. "Politica fiscal de vivienda en España y forma de tenencia de la vivienda habitual: una valoracion empirica a nivel provincial," Regional and Sectoral Economic Studies, Euro-American Association of Economic Development, vol. 4(2).
    8. Praveen Das & Denis Boudreaux & S. P. Uma Rao, 2017. "Do the Federal Income Tax Deductions for Home Ownership Benefit the Less Advantage and Average American Family?," Accounting and Finance Research, Sciedu Press, vol. 6(4), pages 265-265, Novebmer.
    9. Haurin, Donald R. & Gill, H. Leroy, 2002. "The Impact of Transaction Costs and the Expected Length of Stay on Homeownership," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(3), pages 563-584, May.
    10. Anas, Alex & Arnott, Richard J., 1997. "Taxes and allowances in a dynamic equilibrium model of urban housing with a size--quality hierarchy," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(4-5), pages 547-580, August.
    11. Green, Richard K. & Vandell, Kerry D., 1999. "Giving households credit: How changes in the U.S. tax code could promote homeownership," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 419-444, July.
    12. Christian A. L. Hilber & Tracy M. Turner, 2014. "The Mortgage Interest Deduction and its Impact on Homeownership Decisions," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 96(4), pages 618-637, October.
    13. Todd Sinai & Nicholas S. Souleles, 2005. "Owner-Occupied Housing as a Hedge Against Rent Risk," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 120(2), pages 763-789.
    14. Wenli Li & Edison Yu, 2022. "Real Estate Taxes and Home Value: Evidence from TCJA," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 43, pages 125-151, January.
    15. Scholten, Ulrich, 1999. "Die Förderung von Wohneigentum," Beiträge zur Finanzwissenschaft, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, edition 1, volume 8, number urn:isbn:9783161472343, September.
    16. Berkovec, James & Fullerton, Don, 1989. "The General Equilibrium Effects of Inflation on Housing Consumption and Investment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(2), pages 277-282, May.
    17. Skinner, Jonathan, 1996. "The dynamic efficiency cost of not taxing housing," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(3), pages 397-417, March.
    18. Piazzesi, M. & Schneider, M., 2016. "Housing and Macroeconomics," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1547-1640, Elsevier.
    19. Andrew, Mark & Haurin, Donald & Munasib, Abdul, 2006. "Explaining the route to owner-occupation: A transatlantic comparison," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3), pages 189-216, September.
    20. James M. Poterba & Todd M. Sinai, 2008. "Income Tax Provisions Affecting Owner-Occupied Housing: Revenue Costs and Incentive Effects," NBER Working Papers 14253, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3963. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.