Portal: Case Studies

The real record

Theory says taxing land is efficient and shifting tax off buildings encourages construction. The places below let you check that against what actually happened — and the honest verdict is that reality is messier and more conditional than the clean model. Three patterns recur. First, split-rate and site-value taxation work in the predicted direction but modestly: Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania towns, and now a Finnish natural experiment show more construction where tax sits on land rather than buildings, but a New Zealand null and self-selected data keep the finding short of "proven." Second, resource rent capture is the strongest story, but it is conditional on institutions: Norway's sovereign fund is the flagship, Alaska pays a real dividend, Botswana captured its diamond rent — yet the resource curse is equally real where fiscal design and institutions are weak. Third, and most important for advocates to internalize, capturing land rent is not the same as making housing cheap: Singapore and Hong Kong fund their states from land to a degree Georgists dream of, and both have punishing housing costs, because capture without abundant supply raises revenue, not affordability.

The two Danish studies are carried here in explicit tension — one finds land taxes capitalize into lower prices as theory predicts, the other reads the same terrain more skeptically — because a definitive reference shows its disagreements rather than cherry- picking the convenient one. The developing-world entries are the newest and, in RCT terms, the most rigorous evidence in the whole file.

Split-rate and site-value taxation

• Pittsburgh — the longest-running split-rate experiment, and its 1979–80 building surge.
• Oates & Schwab on Pittsburgh — the study that isolated the construction effect from the regional boom.
• Pennsylvania — the wider two-rate record across the state's cities.
• Bourassa on Pittsburgh housing — the tempered read on housing effects.
• Estonia and Tomson on the Estonian LVT — a nationwide pure land tax, administratively cheap.
• Site-value rating in Australia and Australia — decades of municipal SVR, plus the Victoria SVR/NAV comparison.
• Germany and Büttner on German land-tax capitalization — capitalization evidence from the reform debate.

Denmark — two studies in tension

• Denmark — the jurisdiction profile.
• Danish Economic Councils on land taxes and prices — a quasi-experimental capitalization result.
• Nielsson, Wroblewski & Yding on the Danish LVT — the counterpart study read against it.

Resource rents and dividends

• Norway and Lie on the Norwegian oil fund — the flagship capture success.
• Alaska and Jones & Marinescu on the Permanent Fund Dividend — the dividend that did not kill employment.
• Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson on Botswana — diamond rent captured well, institutions the decisive variable.
• Maricá, Brazil — a municipal royalty-funded basic income.

Capture ≠ cheap housing

• Singapore and Hong Kong — maximal land-rent capture alongside severe housing costs.
• The "land capture didn't make housing cheap" objection — why the two are distinct policy goals.

The developing-world frontier

• Bergeron, Tourek & Weigel on the DRC property tax — a randomized property-tax rollout in a low-capacity state.
• Tubío & Reyes on the Loja, Ecuador LVT — a municipal land-value tax evaluated in the field.

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