Dick Netzer

Overview

Dick Netzer (May 14, 1928 – May 7, 2008) was an American public-finance economist who spent most of his career at New York University, where he served as dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration (now the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service).[1][2] He earned his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and became one of the leading American specialists on state and local government finance, publishing widely on property taxation and municipal fiscal policy; he also helped New York City navigate its 1970s fiscal crisis.[1][2] His best-known work, Economics of the Property Tax (Brookings Institution, 1966), is the canonical statement of the traditional (excise-tax) view of property-tax incidence — that a local property tax is borne by housing consumers through higher prices, since capital can migrate out of a high-tax jurisdiction until after-tax returns equalize.[3]

Netzer's traditional view is one of the three rival incidence theories that George R. Zodrow's 2001 survey "A Room with Three Views" organizes the property-tax-incidence literature around, alongside the "new"/capital-tax view and the benefit view — Zodrow dates the traditional view's modern statement to Herbert Simon (1943) and Netzer (1966).[3] Andrew Haughwout's 2001 computable general-equilibrium study of land taxation in New York City, part of the wiki's cluster on site-value CGE simulations, was prepared for a conference held in Netzer's honor, reflecting his standing in the property-tax-economics field.[4]

See Also

• Zodrow (2001): The Property Tax as a Capital Tax — A Room with Three Views — credits Netzer (1966) as a founding statement of the traditional incidence view
• Computable General-Equilibrium Simulations of Site-Value Taxation — includes Haughwout's NYC study, prepared for a conference in Netzer's honor
• A Full Land Tax Destroys Land's Selling Price and Its Own Tax Base — the property-tax objections literature Netzer's work sits within
• Land Value Tax — the reform Netzer's incidence framework is applied to when adapted to a land-only base

Sources

1. Regional Science Association International, "Dick Netzer, 79, Municipal Finance Expert, Dies" (obituary). regionalscience.org/index.php/news/obituaries/item/401-dick-netzer-79-municipal-finance-expert-dies.html — used for his birth (Brooklyn, May 14, 1928), death (May 7, 2008, age 79), and NYU deanship.
2. Journal of Cultural Economics, "Dick Netzer (1929–2008)" obituary notice. link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10824-008-9068-9 — corroborates his death in 2008 and career at NYU; this source's cover year (1929) differs by one year from source 1's precise birth date (1928), a minor discrepancy [VERIFY: exact birth year taken from source 1 as the more precisely dated record].
3. Wiki page Zodrow (2001): A Room with Three Views — used for Netzer's role as a founding source (with Herbert Simon) of the traditional/excise-tax view of property-tax incidence and the citation to Economics of the Property Tax (Brookings, 1966).
4. Wiki page Computable General-Equilibrium Simulations of Site-Value Taxation — used for the detail that Haughwout's NYC land-tax CGE study was "prepared for the conference in honor of Dick Netzer, Federal Reserve Bank of New York."