State and local government tax revenues dropped steeply following the most severe housing market contraction since the Great Depression. The authors identify five main channels through which the housing market affects state and local tax revenues: property tax revenues, transfer tax revenues, sales tax revenues, and personal income tax revenues. They find that property tax revenues do not tend to decrease following house price declines. The other four channels have had a relatively modest effect on state tax revenues. These channels jointly reduced tax revenues by $15 billion from 2005 to 2009, which is about 2% of total state own-source revenues in 2005. Charts and tables. This is a print on demand publication.

State and local government tax revenues dropped steeply following the most severe housing market contraction since the Great Depression. We identify five main channels through which the housing market affects state and local tax revenues: property tax revenues, transfer tax revenues, sales tax revenues (including a direct effect through construction materials and an indirect effect through the link between housing wealth and consumption), and personal income tax revenues. We find that property tax revenues do not tend to decrease following house price declines. We conclude that the resilience of property tax receipts is due to significant lags between market values and assessed values of housing and the tendency of policy makers to offset declines in the tax base with higher tax rates. The other four channels have had a relatively modest effect on state tax revenues. We calculate that these channels jointly reduced tax revenues by $15 billion from 2005 to 2009, which is about 2 percent of total state own-source revenues in 2005. We conclude that the recent contraction in state and local tax revenues has been driven primarily by the general economic recession, rather than the housing market per-se.

Although the Great Recession put the U.S. economy into a tailspin, we know little about how the changes in house prices influenced property tax collections. Using local level housing data from Zillow matched to property tax data from 1998 to 2012, two questions are examined. First, the elasticity of property tax revenue with respect to house values is estimated. Second, the timing of this elasticity is determined. The analysis rules out that local policymakers capture the entire increase of house value in property tax revenues but unable to rule out that increases in house values are completely offset by changes in effective property tax rates. Decreases in values have an elasticity between 0.3 and 0.4 and take three years for changes in values to impact property tax revenues. While property tax collections declined, local policymakers adjusted effective millage rates such that revenues did not decline as much as home values.

We use a novel dataset on effective property tax rates in U.S. states and metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) over the 2005–2014 period to analyze the relationship between property tax rates and house price volatility. We find that property tax rates have a negative impact on house price volatility. The impact is causal, with increases in property tax rates leading to a reduction in house price volatility. The results are robust to different measures of house price volatility, estimation methodologies, and additional controls for housing demand and supply. The outcomes of the analysis have important policy implications and suggest that property taxation could be used as an important tool to dampen house price volatility.