Florenz Plassmann

Overview

Florenz Plassmann is an economist who has co-authored multiple contributions to the land-economics and public-finance literature with Nicolaus Tideman. His two principal works in this area are a 2000 Journal of Urban Economics paper providing the strongest multi-municipality empirical evidence that split-rate (two-rate) property taxation increases construction, and a 2008 paper proposing auction-based mechanisms to solve the holdout problem in urban land assembly. [VERIFY: institutional affiliation, academic position, and full scope of Plassmann's research program beyond these two collaborations — no biographical sources were available in this session.]

Key Contributions

Split-Rate Taxation and Construction (2000)

Plassmann and Tideman's 2000 paper, "A Markov Chain Monte Carlo Analysis of the Effect of Two-Rate Property Taxes on Construction," assembled data on building permits from 15 Pennsylvania municipalities that taxed land at a higher rate than improvements, covering the period 1972–1994. Pennsylvania is uniquely suited to this analysis because state law permits cities to set separate land and building rates, creating a natural experiment with many cases and degrees of variation. The authors used Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods to estimate the effect while handling the statistical difficulties of the panel.[1]

The key finding: a higher tax rate on land, relative to the rate on structures, is associated with a statistically significant increase in the number and value of building permits. The effect operates in the direction Georgist theory predicts — shifting the tax burden off improvements and onto land encourages development. Where the Pittsburgh study by Oates and Schwab examined a single city, this paper exploits variation across many, making it the strongest multi-municipality empirical evidence for the split-rate-increases-construction outcome.[1]

Efficient Land Assembly (2008)

Tideman and Plassmann's 2008 paper, "Providing Incentives for Efficient Land Assembly," tackles the holdout problem: when a project needs many adjacent parcels, individual owners can block assembly or extort excess payment by refusing to sell. The authors design auction-based and self-assessment mechanisms that elicit owners' true valuations and enable efficient land assembly without coercion — a problem closely related to the Harberger tax (COST) idea of self-assessed values. The paper shows that the Georgist tradition contributes not only a tax proposal but practical mechanism-design solutions to land-market frictions.[2]

Significance

Plassmann's collaborative work with Tideman bridges the Georgist tradition and rigorous modern empirical and mechanism-design economics. The 2000 construction paper is frequently cited as the strongest multi-jurisdiction evidence that shifting property taxes off buildings and onto land stimulates development — a central empirical claim in the case for land value taxation. The 2008 land-assembly paper extends Georgist reasoning into the domain of market design, addressing a practical friction — the holdout problem — that arises from the unique, immovable nature of land.[1][2]

[VERIFY: whether Plassmann has authored or co-authored additional work on land value taxation, property taxation, or related public-finance topics beyond these two Tideman collaborations. The supplied corpus contains only these two papers; a future editor should consult Plassmann's CV or academic profile for a complete bibliography.]

See Also

• Nicolaus Tideman
• Split-Rate Taxation
• Plassmann & Tideman — Construction
• Tideman & Plassmann — Land Assembly
• Holdout Problem
• Split-Rate Taxation Increases Construction

Sources

1. Florenz Plassmann & Nicolaus Tideman (2000), "A Markov Chain Monte Carlo Analysis of the Effect of Two-Rate Property Taxes on Construction," Journal of Urban Economics 47(2):216–247. Publisher — used for the empirical finding that split-rate taxation increases construction, the MCMC methodology, and the 15-municipality Pennsylvania dataset.
2. Nicolaus Tideman & Florenz Plassmann (2008), "Providing Incentives for Efficient Land Assembly," SSRN. Paper — used for the auction-based and self-assessment mechanisms addressing the holdout problem in land assembly.

[VERIFY: Plassmann's institutional affiliation, academic position, and any additional publications. No biographical or institutional sources were available in this session; all claims above are grounded solely in the two co-authored papers and the existing wiki corpus pages that cite them.]