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Behavioral Economics Commons™

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Selected Works

Public Economics

Sebastien J Bradley

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Behavioral Economics

Inattention To Deferred Increases In Tax Bases: How Michigan Homebuyers Are Paying For Assessment Limits, Sebastien J. Bradley Feb 2017

Inattention To Deferred Increases In Tax Bases: How Michigan Homebuyers Are Paying For Assessment Limits, Sebastien J. Bradley

Sebastien J Bradley

The Michigan property tax system gives rise to wide variation in taxable basis across comparable homes due to the application of acquisition-value based assessment limits. Exploiting the fact that the resulting differences in property tax liability are temporarily inherited by new homebuyers, I estimate the degree of capitalization of these largely-idiosyncratic tax differences in a setting free of many of the econometric problems that typically plague estimation of property tax capitalization in order to evaluate whether homebuyers understand the tax implications of their home purchases. Consistent with anecdotal evidence, I find that homebuyers are woefully inattentive to the temporary nature …

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Property Tax Salience And Payment Delinquency, Sebastien J. Bradley Jul 2013

Property Tax Salience And Payment Delinquency, Sebastien J. Bradley

Sebastien J Bradley

Despite only modest supporting evidence, shocks to households' personal finances are commonly cited as one of the principal causes of homeowner defaults. In this paper, I investigate the extent to which different component sources of annual variation in property tax obligations influence the probability and magnitude of property tax delinquency|a precursor to mortgage default. Under Michigan's system of property tax limitations, rational homeowners should readily anticipate changes in tax liability, making such changes an unlikely cause of delinquency, regardless of the underlying source. Looking at tax payment records for the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan for the period 2006-2009, I …

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