Last Name
Weigand
First name
Alois
Email
alois.weigand@unisg.ch
ORCID
Phone
+41 71 224 7059
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PublicationDo Local Governments Tax Homeowner Communities Differently?This article investigates whether and how strongly the share of homeowners in a community affects residential property taxation by local governments. Different from renters, homeowners bear the full property tax burden, irrespective of local market conditions, and the tax is more salient to them. “Homeowner communities” may hence oppose high property taxes in order to protect their housing wealth. By merging granular spatial data from a complete housing inventory in the 2011 German Census with historical homeownership rates and housing damages during the Second World War as sources of exogenous variation in local homeownership, we provide empirical evidence that otherwise identical jurisdictions charge significantly lower property taxes when the share of homeowners in their population is higher. This result is invariant to local market conditions, which suggests tax salience is the key mechanism behind this effect. Moreover, we find positive spatial dependence on tax multipliers, indicative of property tax mimicking by local governments.Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
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PublicationPrivate Equity Infrastructure Funds(Palgrave Macmillan, 2023-07-24)
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PublicationResidential Rent Externalities of Photovoltaic Systems: The Relevance of ViewWe study how photovoltaic (PV) systems externally affect the rents of residential dwellings. By creating a three-dimensional topographical model of our study areas in Switzerland, we model each building’s view at surrounding PV installations and merge this data with rental price observations. In the hedonic difference-in-differences regressions, we provide evidence of how this view (impaired or unimpaired) on a PV system is associated with lower residential rents. This effect is stronger for the view at multiple PV systems rather than at a single one, in situations where seeing is more likely, and where PV installations disrupt a scenic view. However, price penalties are attenuated if rental dwellings have their own PV system or if neighboring properties have large PV systems, which may benefit surrounding tenants in terms of electricity provision. Furthermore, by using municipal voting results on the Swiss Energy Act 2017 and the Swiss CO2 Act in 2021, we show how stated preferences for sustainability drive the external effects of PV systems on rents. We document a similar causal pathway for lived preferences measured by the number and change in electric vehicles in Swiss municipalities.Type:Volume:Issue:
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PublicationThe Low-Carbon Rent Premium of Residential BuildingsBased on 92,600 rental contracts in the Swiss real estate market, we study how a property’s CO2 emissions affect net rental values. We use a novel measure of operational carbon emissions that relies on various parameters related to the sustainability and energy efficiency of a building as well as the climate conditions of its location. In an extensive hedonic framework, our results suggest that apartments in low-carbon buildings have higher net rents. Sub-analysis of urban and rural areas as well as warm and cold locations show that lower ancillary costs of sustainable apartments are one driver of this low-carbon rent premium. Another driving factor is tenants’ higher preferences for environmentally friendly living as shown by sample spits across regions with high and low support of the Swiss Federal Act for the Reduction of Greenhouse Gas Emissions. In light of Europe’s energy crisis, we further document a slight increase in our main effect. Based on 611 residential building transactions, we also show that low-carbon buildings have lower capitalization rates, which translate into higher market values due to lower risk premiums.Type:Volume:Issue: