Presented By: Department of Economics
Tax Preferential Treatment of Residential Housing and Migration
Dena Lomonosov, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This paper evaluates how household location decisions are impacted by federal deductions of location-specific costs, including state and local taxes and mortgage interest. When these expenses are tax deductible, they reduce the after-tax cost differential in house prices and taxes across states and metropolitan areas. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) reduced the benefits of these deductions by increasing the standard deduction and capping state and local tax deductions at $10,000. Using a difference-in-differences methodology that exploits variation in exposure to the TCJA and a panel of household residences, I find that the reduction in deduction benefits increased the probability of high-income households moving to a different metropolitan area. Conditional on moving, these households sought out lower-tax destinations.