Coloquio del IESTA: The capitalization of public policy in housing markets: Taxes, regulation, and subsidies in Chile & Uruguay

El Instituto de Estadística (IESTA) de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración (FCEA) invita a participar del coloquio mensual abierto a todo público titulado The capitalization of public policy in housing markets: Taxes, regulation, and subsidies in Chile & Uruguay, a cargo de PhD Student. Joaquin Toledo (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile).

La actividad se realizará el miércoles 15 de julio a las 14 horas en el Salón 4 de la FCEA.

Estos coloquios tienen el objetivo de generar un espacio de intercambio en el que docentes de grados iniciales del instituto presenten, en charlas breves y accesibles, temas de matemática y estadística que estén investigando o que hayan despertado su interés durante su formación académica.

Resumen

Housing policy operates through three main instruments—taxation, land-use regulation, and subsidies—but the question of who ultimately bears their costs and benefits is empirically subtle. My research uses housing prices and rents as observable signals of how public policy is absorbed by markets, drawing on cadastral and administrative microdata from Chilean and Uruguayan cities and on quasi-experimental identification strategies (regression discontinuity, regression kink, and difference-in-differences designs). I organize my work around three questions. On taxation, I ask how property taxes are capitalized into prices and rents, and under what conditions tax status conveys information to market participants rather than acting purely as a cost. On regulation, I ask when land-use rules are economically binding—through which instruments and under which institutional and enforcement conditions—and how political dynamics shape the rules themselves. On subsidies, I ask who actually captures the benefits of tax-incentive housing programs, and how the composition of subsidized supply reshapes market segmentation and affordability.