Final Report: Legislative Property Tax Study Committee, January 2009

The Committee was authorized to meet three days during the 2007 Legislative Interim and two days during the 2008 Legislative Interim. The Committee met on September 12, 2007; November 7, 2007; December 5, 2007; November 14, 2008; and January 7, 2009, at the State Capitol, Des Moines, Iowa. In 2008, the Committee retained consultants from the Institute for Public Policy at George Washington University to study property taxation and other forms of revenue generation used by local governments in Iowa and other states.

Strategic behaviours in healthcare : evidence from primary care and pharmaceutical markets

We analyse the strategic behaviours of agents in a market through the appropriate¬ness of their skills to the market. If agents' skills are well adapted to market and they can reach their target, they will not need to adopt strategic behaviours. The agents will behave as selfish individuals. However, if their skills are not well adapted and they cannot attain their target alone, they will adopt strategic behaviours to reach their objectives. These behaviours will have a different impact on the utilities of other agents, depending on the skills and the objectives of the agent. If these agents need other agents to reach their objectives, they will behave as altruistic individuals who internalise the utilities of other agents in reaching their objectives and will adopt cooperative behaviours. However, if these agents fear that other agents could prevent them from reaching their target because they can foresee that the skills of other agents are better adapted than their own skills, the agents will then behave as predator individuals and will adopt destructive behaviours to attain their objective. It is in the interests of these agents to manipulate information to increase disorder and dissimulate their lack of skills. They will reproduce the strategies of animals that modify their appearance to escape predators or simulate being bait to attract their prey. These agents will seek to induce chaos into the behaviours of other agents to amplify the impact of their strategies. The appropriateness of skills to the market allows an understanding of the emer-gence of networks and associated strategies. The members of a networks are inputs who are excluded when their costs are higher than their benefits. A network simul-taneously allows cooperation and selfish, predatory behaviours among its members. A network may adopt informational strategies when seeking to become the leader in a market or when it cannot survive. The creation of networks and the manipulation of information are two overlapping evolutionary strategies, with the first strategy favouring the second. In our model, an agent does not behave like a firm that aims only to maximise the profits of the firm but rather as a member of a network who adopts strategic behaviours as a function of the interests of this network. If his skills are well adapted to the market and he can innovate, he will not invest in erroneous input; in contrast, if his skills are not adapted, the agent will invest in the erroneous input of information into the market in order to survive. Therefore, when any informational asymmetries between the agents and their principals characterise the market, the price cannot be the main element that allows equilibrium to be reached in the market; instead, the appropriateness of skills to the market enables equilibrium. We will now apply these hypotheses to explain the strategic behaviours of physicians and pharmaceutical companies.

Consistency and population sensitivity properties in marriage and Rrommate markets

We consider one-to-one matching markets in which agents can either be matched as pairs or remain single. In these so-called roommate markets agents are consumers and resources at the same time. Klaus (Games Econ Behav 72:172-186, 2011) introduced two new "population sensitivity" properties that capture the effect newcomers have on incumbent agents: competition sensitivity and resource sensitivity. On various roommate market domains (marriage markets, no-odd-rings roommate markets, solvable roommate markets),we characterize the core using either of the population sensitivity properties in addition to weak unanimity and consistency. On the domain of all roommate markets, we obtain two associated impossibility results.

Property Valuation Report, 2007

Iowa law requires every city and county assessor to submit to the Iowa Department of Revenue an annual Abstract of Assessment reflecting assessed values of real property. The Iowa Department of Revenue has received and reviewed each 2007 Abstract of Assessment and summarized the valuation data. The values reported on the Abstracts of Assessment are one hundred percent (100%) of the actual value of property as established by the assessors and approved by local boards of review.

Property Valuation Report, 2008

Iowa law requires every city and county assessor to submit to the Iowa Department of Revenue an annual Abstract of Assessment reflecting assessed values of real property. The Iowa Department of Revenue has received and reviewed each 2008 Abstract of Assessment and summarized the valuation data. The values reported on the Abstracts of Assessment are one hundred percent (100%) of the actual value of property as established by the assessors and approved by local boards of review.

Property Valuation Report, 2009

Iowa law requires every city and county assessor to submit to the Iowa Department of Revenue an annual Abstract of Assessment reflecting assessed values of real property. The Iowa Department of Revenue has received and reviewed each 2009 Abstract of Assessment and summarized the valuation data. The values reported on the Abstracts of Assessment are one hundred percent (100%) of the actual value of property as established by the assessors and approved by local boards of review.

Tax Exempt Property Report, 2008

Iowa law requires each assessor in the state to value tax exempt property within his or her jurisdiction, and report such values to the Director of Revenue each year. The following report lists the 2009 actual valuations of tax exempt property for the following types of property: religious institutions, literary societies and educational institutions, low rent housing, associations of war veterans, charitable and benevolent societies, libraries and art galleries, dwelling unit property, homes for soldiers, and racetracks. Also presented in this report are comparative 2008 exempt property values.

Tax Exempt Property Report, 2009

Iowa law requires each assessor in the state to value tax exempt property within his or her jurisdiction, and report such values to the Director of Revenue each year. The following report lists the 2009 actual valuations of tax exempt property for the following types of property: religious institutions, literary societies and educational institutions, low rent housing, associations of war veterans, charitable and benevolent societies, libraries and art galleries, dwelling unit property, homes for soldiers, and racetracks. Also presented in this report are comparative 2008 exempt property values.

Tax Exempt Property Report, 2010

Iowa law requires each assessor in the state to value tax exempt property within his or her jurisdiction, and report such values to the Director of Revenue each year. The following report lists the 2009 actual valuations of tax exempt property for the following types of property: religious institutions, literary societies and educational institutions, low rent housing, associations of war veterans, charitable and benevolent societies, libraries and art galleries, dwelling unit property, homes for soldiers, and racetracks. Also presented in this report are comparative 2008 exempt property values.

Are commuting and residential mobility decisions simultaneous? : the case of Catalonia (Spain)

In this paper we study the commuting and moving decisions of workers in Catalonia (Spain) and its evolution in the 1986-1996 period. Using a microdata sample from the 1991 Spanish Population Census, we estimate a simultaneous, discrete choice model of commuting and moves, thus indirectly addressing the home and job location decisions. The econometrical framework is a simultaneous, binary probit model with a commute equation and a move equation

A territorial model of commuting in Catalonia, 1986-1996

Commuting consists in the fact that an important fraction of workers in developed countries do not reside close to their workplaces but at long distances from them, so they have to travel to their jobs and then back home daily. Although most workers hold a job in the same municipality where they live or in a neighbouring one, an important fraction of workers face long daily trips to get to their workplace and then back home.Even if we divide Catalonia (Spain) in small aggregations of municipalities, trying to make them as close to local labour markets as possible, we will find out that some of them have a positive commuting balance, attracting many workers from other areas and providing local jobs for almost all their resident workers. On the other side, other zones seem to be mostly residential, so an important fraction of their resident workers hold jobs in different local labour markets. Which variables influence an area¿s role as an attraction pole or a residential zone? In previous papers (Artís et al, 1998a, 2000; Romaní, 1999) we have brought out the main individual variables that influence commuting by analysing a sample of Catalan workers and their commuting decisions. In this paper we perform an analysis of the territorial variables that influence commuting, using data for aggregate commuting flows in Catalonia from the 1991 and 1996 Spanish Population Censuses.These variables influence commuting in two different ways: a zone with a dense, welldeveloped economical structure will have a high density of jobs. Work demand cannot be fulfilled with resident workers, so it spills over local boundaries. On the other side, this economical activity has a series of side-effects like pollution, congestion or high land prices which make these areas less desirable to live in. Workers who can afford it may prefer to live in less populated, less congested zones, where they can find cheaper land, larger homes and a better quality of life. The penalty of this decision is an increased commuting time. Our aim in this paper is to highlight the influence of local economical structure and amenities endowment in the workplace-residence location decision. A place-to-place logit commuting models is estimated for 1991 and 1996 in order to find the economical and amenities variables with higher influence in commuting decisions. From these models, we can outline a first approximation to the evolution of these variables in the 1986-1996 period. Data have been obtained from aggregate flow travel-matrix from the 1986, 1991 and 1996 Spanish Population Censuses

The effects of tax deductibility on the mix of property taxes and use charges: an empirical analysis of the spanish case

This paper tests some hypothesis about the determinants of the local tax structure. In particular, we focus on the effects that the property tax deductibility in the national income tax has on the relative use of the property tax and user charges. We deal with the incentive effects that local governments face regarding the different sources of revenue by means of a model in which the local tax structure and the level of public expenditure arise as a result of the maximizing behaviour of local politicians subject to the economic effects of the tax system. We attempt to test the hypothesis developed with data corresponding to a set of Spanish municipalities during the period 1987-9l. We find that tax deductibility provides incentives to raise revenues from the property tax but does not introduce a biass against user charges or in favor of overall spending growth

Multi-sided Böhm-Bawerk assignment markets: the nucleolus and the core-center

En aquest treball mostrem que, a diferència del cas bilateral, per als mercats multilaterals d'assignació coneguts amb el nom de Böhm-Bawerk assignment games, el nucleolus i el core-center, i. e. el centre de masses del core, no coincideixen en general. Per demostrar-ho provem que donant un m-sided Böhm-Bawerk assignment game les dues solucions anteriors poden obtenir-se respectivament del nucleolus i el core-center d'un joc convex definit en el conjunt format pels m sectors. Encara més, provem que per calcular el nucleolus d'aquest últim joc només les coalicions formades per un jugador o m-1 jugadors són importants. Aquests resultats simplifiquen el càlcul del nucleolus d'un multi-sided ¿¿ohm-Bawerk assignment market amb un número molt elevat d'agents.