Policy Experiments in Property Tax

There was a long-standing belief in baseball that scouting was the best way to find major league talent.  This belief was challenged by Billy Bean, made famous in the book Moneyball.  What the “Moneyball” experiment proposed was using a set of data-driven studies to determine the skills that truly contributed to winning games. For example, the studies showed that on-base percentage is a better predictor of value than batting average.

 The “Moneyball” concept was not really new in economic circles.  Evaluating institutional decision-making processes through results has been a long tradition.  What was new was the application to baseball.  This concept is just as applicable to government initiatives, especially tax policy design.

 Unfortunately, the tradition of most tax policy, like traditional scouting for baseball talent, is an institutional opinion based on historic anecdotal results.  Very few, if any, programs are tested to determine whether conventional wisdom was an accurate predictor of the outcome. This lecture proposes, as a first step to an ultimate goal of rigorous program evaluations, tax policy experiments for inbound real estate investments.