This paper examines the effects of real estate transfer taxes (RETT) on property prices using a micro dataset of roughly 17 million German properties for the period from 2005 to 2019. Our empirical analysis exploits variation in RETT rate hikes across German states and over time. Our monthly event study estimates indicate a price response that strongly exceeds the change in the tax burden for single transactions. Twelve months after a reform, a one percentage point increase in the tax rate reduces property prices by on average 3%. Negative price effects are predominantly found in counties where properties sell quickly and price discounts are small and in growing housing market regions. Moreover, effects are stronger for apartments and apartment buildings than for single-family houses. Our results can be rationalized by a theoretical model that predicts larger price responses in sellers' markets and for properties with a high transaction frequency.

Several types of taxation include the market value of housing in the tax base. Thus, it becomes important to obtain accurate, timely house values. However, to value residential property represents a major challenge for tax administrations due to informational constraints. In the present paper we present and discuss a simple procedure for assigning market value to each dwelling in Norway, based on deriving estimates from hedonic regressions. The valuations are updated yearly to reflect changes in market value. To our knowledge, this is a novel example of using predictions obtained from regression estimates to define full-scale housing values for tax purpose. We present and discuss two versions of our procedure -- the first prediction model that was implemented in 2010 and a simple, but significant, upgrade of the model that could be implemented with no additional gathering of data.

This paper presents novel estimates on the incidence of corporate taxes by measuring the effect of local business tax increases on the welfare of commercial landowners. We use unique data on commercial real estate prices in Germany covering 1 million properties offered for sale and 2.4 million properties offered for rent between 2008 and 2018. Empirically, we exploit the German institutional setting with over 4,000 municipal tax changes using an event study design. The estimates suggest that a 1 percentage point business tax increase reduces commercial real estate prices (rents) by 3 percent (2 percent) after 5 years on average. This result is robust to the inclusion of a large set of controls and to heterogeneous treatment effect estimators. We find that commercial landowners bear between 15-24% of the tax burden, while workers (7-20%) and residential landowners (4-25%) bear less burden than prior research suggests with firm owners around 44-57%.

Liability-side equivalence suggests that economic incidence is independent of statutory incidence. We empirically test this conjecture by studying a policy intervention in the German market for real estate agents, which partially shifted the statutory incidence of agent fees from buyers to sellers. Specifically, we study listings posted on online real estate marketplaces two months before and after the implementation date. We employ a difference-in-differences estimation that exploits region- and listing-type-specific susceptibility to the intervention. Our results suggest that liability-side equivalence generally holds, but with two qualifications. First, sellers did not adjust listing prices, but effected higher transaction prices in bilateral negotiations. Second, sellers were only able to do so when they had bargaining power over buyers. We further find that demand for brokerage decreased following the intervention. Our findings have important implications for the distribution of statutory incidence of intermediary fees in matching markets and tax liability considerations.