PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Duke, Joshua M.
AU  - Gao, TianHang
TI  - An Experimental Economics Investigation of the Land Value Tax: Efficiency, Acceptability, and Positional Goods
AID  - 10.3368/le.94.4.475
DP  - 2018 Nov 01
TA  - Land Economics
PG  - 475--495
VI  - 94
IP  - 4
4099  - http://le.uwpress.org/content/94/4/475.short
4100  - http://le.uwpress.org/content/94/4/475.full
SO  - Land Econ2018 Nov 01; 94
AB  - This research offers the first economic experiment investigating the land tax, where landowners invest under different property tax regimes. A voting treatment assesses the relative acceptability of land value taxation. Results show a land tax produced greater overall welfare in only 37.5% of the experiment sessions. Systematic overinvestment arises from the positional-good characteristic of residential land investment, but this effect vanishes when the positional-good indicator is removed. The experiments show that the participants unexpectedly voted in favor of the land tax, suggesting that the efficiency and acceptability of the land tax may be more complex than in nonbehavioral economics modeling. (JEL H21, H71)