Estimados/as Académicos/as,

Les extendemos la invitación al seminario que organiza el Departamento de Economía, en el que se presentará el trabajo titulado "Property Taxes as Market Signals: Evidence from Housing Markets with Information Frictions".

Expone: Hugo Silva, profesor asociado, PUC

Coautores: Joaquín Toledo.

Abstract: This paper estimates the causal effect of property tax liability on housing prices using georeferenced transaction and cadastral data from Santiago, Chile. Using a sharp regression discontinuity design (RDD) at the exemption threshold, we document a novel "tax premium'': becoming liable for property tax raises average housing prices by approximately 4 percent. We hypothesize that tax liability acts as a third-party certification that reduces information asymmetry, thereby overcoming the negative capitalization of tax costs. We evaluate this mechanism using three complementary tests. First, we systematically rule out alternative structural channels such as increased local public spending and social sorting. Second, we show that the positive effect is driven by the extensive margin (being liable to taxes). By contrast, when we estimate the impact at the intensive margin using tax-rate changes at a higher threshold, we find the standard negative capitalization effect. Finally, by categorizing transactions by the magnitude of informational opacity derived from a hedonic price model, we find that the tax premium is negligible in transparent segments and is large and significant for properties with high informational friction. These findings suggest that in developing markets with informational gaps, fiscal tools can inadvertently serve as market signals, reversing standard incidence predictions.

El formato será presencial en la sala P-303.

Saludos cordiales,

Dirección de Investigación