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Communities

Capturing the Value and Attention of Our Communities

We subsidize advertising campaigns of multinational corporations. Every time we sit in our cars stuck in traffic on clogged arterial roads and forced to look at an ad for a Big Mac or Starbucks Coffee, we’re looking at an ad subsidized by our tax dollars.

The value of their advertisements is worth ten times what they pay, because of how US streets are designed. While the value of the land we build on is not something people think about, it is something corporations think deeply about and understand.

The Public Finance Effects of the Italian Ghost Buildings Program

Does informality hold back tax progressivity, that is, the capacity to tax the rich at a higher rate than the poor? The optimal (and fair) distribution of the tax burden has long been a key issue in both academic and policy circles.

In a new paper, I study whether reducing informality by tackling tax evasion leads policy makers to increase statutory tax progressivity. I take advantage of the Italian “Ghost Buildings” program, which is a policy that identified buildings not registered in the land registry.

Shared Truth

Apparently, cyberattacks do not only involve computer programming. There is a thing called perception hacking, a name for the kind of disinformation campaign that starts online and seeks to sow distrust and division deeply and widely in a society. In the run up to the… Read More »Shared Truth

Green Acres

Land Value Taxation (LVT) would level the playing field between new farmers and established mortgage-free farmers who presently have a huge (‘I was on the island first’) advantage.

By untaxing jobs and improvements, LVT would bias towards labor-intensive, structure-intensive, value-added farming; this would mean a bias towards organic farms (which both uses less land and uses it more intensively).