David C Lincoln Fellows, 2011–2012

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 2011-2012 DCL fellowships announced here constitute the tenth group to be awarded. This program is administered through the Lincoln Institute's Department of Valuation and Taxation.

  • David Albouy
  • Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Michigan
  • Urban Land Value: Measurement and Theory
  • This project estimates land-value differences across U.S. metropolitan areas with a large, new database of market values. These differences are explained through local site characteristics, or "amenities," and are used to estimate production parameters for residential housing, including the income share to land. We also estimate the costs and benefits of "regulatory taxes" on land to determine if they reduce land values. Finally, the theory of urban land values is addressed in an urban system of heterogeneous cities. Land-rent and federal labor tax payments produce across-city externalities, increasing with city size, meaning that cities could be too small.
  • Richard Almy
  • Partner, Almy, Gloudemans, Jacobs & Denne
  • A Global Compendium and Meta-Analysis of Property Tax Systems
  • The researcher proposes to build a global, maintainable compendium of significant features of systems for recurrently taxing land and buildings. Revenue statistics and other economic data compiled by international organizations and others will supplement the feature summaries. The summaries will be based on works published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and others describing national property tax systems. The aim of the compendium and meta-analysis is to provide researchers and practitioners with useful facts and patterns of system features, revenue statistics, and other data.
  • Shawn Rohlin
  • Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Akron
  • Curtis L. Reynolds
  • Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Kent State University
  • Do Location-based Tax Incentives Improve Quality of Life and Quality of Business Environment?
  • We will examine how location-based tax incentives affect quality of life and business environment through changes in land values and equilibrium wages. We will use the federal Empowerment Zone program, which offers tax incentives to firms, as a natural experiment to determine whether this form of economic redevelopment policy improves the area. This project will be one of the first to analyze a tax policy that affects only a subset of a metropolitan area by showing that quality of life methodologies can be applied using small geographically-aggregated data, such as census block groups, opening new possibilities to the literature.