David C Lincoln Fellows, 2010–2011

The David C. Lincoln Fellowships in Land Value Taxation (LVT) were established in 1999 to develop academic and professional interest in this topic through support for major research projects. The fellowship program honors David C. Lincoln, former chairman of the Lincoln Foundation and founding chairman of the Lincoln Institute, and his long-standing interest in LVT. The program encourages scholars and practitioners to undertake new work in the basic theory of LVT and its applications. These research projects add to the knowledge and understanding of LVT as a component of contemporary fiscal systems in countries throughout the world. The 2010-2011 DCL fellowships announced here constitute the eleventh group to be awarded. This program is administered through the Lincoln Institute's Department of Valuation and Taxation.

  • Leah Brooks
  • Senior Economist, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Washington, DC
  • Byron Lutz
  • Senior Economist, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Washington, DC
  • Estimating the Regulatory Land Tax in Boom and Bust
  • This paper addresses two questions: first, how the regulatory tax - the wedge between equilibrium market price and observed market price due to land use restrictions - varies across the business cycle; and second, whether land assembly - the grouping of small pieces of land into larger clusters - is efficient. The authors estimate efficiency using land valuation methods. If land assembly is not efficient, they seek to determine whether this is due to a private market failure in bargaining between developers and sellers or to the public market failure of the regulatory tax. The study uses detailed property-level data over 11 years for the County of Los Angeles to analyze these questions.
  • Gregory Burge
  • Assistant Professor, University of Oklahoma
  • Urban Sprawl, Land Prices, and Impact Fees
  • Nearly twenty years have elapsed since the topics of development impact fees and urban sprawl were first linked in the literature. Still, surprisingly little is known about how impact fee programs implemented over the past few decades have affected the spatial distribution of urban development and the market values of developed and undeveloped land. This study reviews and extends the theoretical literature considering these relationships and empirically investigates the effects of impact fees on the price of developed and undeveloped urban land, as well as specific measures relating to urban sprawl.
  • Seong-Hoon Cho
  • Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Dayton M. Lambert
  • Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Roland K. Roberts
  • Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • A Dual-Rate Property Tax: Exploring the Potential for Moderating the Effects of Sprawl on Residential Development at the Metropolitan County Level
  • This project evaluates the effectiveness of a dual-rate property tax on moderating sprawl. It focuses particularly on how land development decisions accumulate over space, affecting changes in spatial patterns of development. A spatial process model of landowners’ conversion decisions links the effects of a dual-rate property tax on parcel-level land conversion through ex ante simulations, demonstrating with spatial forecasts (1) how the dual-rate property tax promotes development of land around existing infrastructure; and (2) how the dual-rate tax affects the degree of compactness at the metropolitan-county level.
  • Stanley Longhofer
  • Professor, Wichita State University, Kansas
  • Less than Nothing: Land Value Taxation When Land Values are Negative
  • Recent research attempting to decompose land and structure values has been developed under the implicit assumption that land values will be positive. Theoretically, however, the costs associated with holding land mean that negative land values are perfectly feasible. This project explores the circumstances under which land values are negative and then applies several methods for estimating land values to data in Wichita, Kansas, to determine the prevalence of negative land values in this community over time. Finally, it explores the implications of negative land values for implementing a land taxation regime.