This article summarizes a March 2007 TPC-Northwestern conference examining state and local finances. Reprinted from Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Land Lines October 2007 issue.

The State & Local Finance Initiative’s State Economic Monitor tracks economic-performance data across the states and the District of Columbia, highlighting differences in key indicators including employment, wages, housing, and taxes. This quarter’s report finds the unemployment rate fell in...

As the US housing market experiences its largest contraction since the Great Depression, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center took a closer look at the consequences of this crisis for state and local governments in a May 2010 conference.This article...

Personal income tax systems vary widely across states, leading to different levels of progressivity. Forty-three states and the District of Columbia have an individual income tax. Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming do not tax personal income, while New...

The charitable property tax exemption can have significant revenue implications for municipalities with large nonprofit sectors and heavy reliance on the property tax. Interest in policies to offset these revenue implications has grown because of the growth of the nonprofit sector in recent...

Recent budget pressures have led many states to cut future pension benefits for state workers. Using New Jersey as a case study, this report describes how these reforms ignore larger employee recruitment and retention issues for today's more mobile workforce. State retirement plans generally do...

This brief presents an overview of residential property taxes. The brief considers recent trends in aggregate property tax revenues and examines the property tax at the county level. Property taxes are an important source of revenue for local governments, though effective property tax rates vary...

This paper applies tax incidence theory to estimate the distributional effects of the exemption from federal income tax of interest on state and local bonds and the President's proposal to limit the benefit of the exemption to the 28 percent rate. When one accounts for the effects of changes in...

This Tax Fact examines the property tax burden as a share of home value in the United States. Most counties have property tax burdens between 0.5 and 1.5 percent of home value. As a share of home values, counties in the Northeast, parts of the Midwest, and Texas tend to have higher property...

Federal taxpayers choose between itemizing deductions and claiming the standard deduction. Itemizers can claim deductions for state and local income and property taxes paid. (Through 2013, taxpayers may deduct state and local sales taxes paid in lieu of income taxes.) In 2011, 46.6 million...