We’re excited to announce another upcoming seminar in the 2025 Stone Inequality Seminar Series! We’ll be hearing from Sebastian Siegloch, a professor of economics and Head of the Economics Department at the University of Cologne. Siegloch will be presenting his paper, titled “Welfare Effects of Property Taxation.”
Abstract
We investigate the welfare implications of property taxation. We apply a sufficient statistics approach that accounts for the distributional effects of tax changes at the household level within a spatial equilibrium framework. We show that equity effects are driven by price adjustments in the housing and labor markets, while efficiency is determined by changes in public goods. Using microdata and exploiting 5,500 municipal property tax changes in Germany, where assessed housing values remain constant, we find that 83 percent of the tax burden is passed through to rental prices, with modest labor market effects. Simulations of the welfare effects of property taxes reveal that the price effects of property tax hikes are regressive. Despite low efficiency costs of the tax, it becomes distributionally neutral only if public good preferences are very high.
Event Details
Date: April 29, 2025
Time: 3:30 – 5:00 PM
Location: Iona 533, 6000 Iona Dr, Vancouver, BC
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Sebastian Siegloch is a professor of economics at the University of Cologne and a member of the DFG Excellence Cluster ECONtribute of the Universities of Cologne and Bonn. He is currently the Head of the Economics Department, a Director at the FiFo Institute for Public Economics at the University of Cologne, and a Research Fellow at CEPR, IZA and CESifo.
Siegloch’s research is on the intersection of Public, Labor, and Urban Economics. He uses large datasets and exploits quasi-experimental variation to quantify how economic policy affects market outcomes. He is interested in what these behavioral responses imply for the efficiency of economic policies and how they shape inequality. In 2021, Siegloch was awarded an ERC starting grant for the project “Housing, Inequality and Public Policies (HIPPO)”.
Siegloch’s work has been published in the American Economic Review, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of the European Economic Association, and the Journal of Public Economics, among others.