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Professor Heim Wins Fellowship for Research on Fiscal Structures and Urban Growth

Carol E. Heim, Professor of Economics and Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA) faculty member, has been awarded a David C. Lincoln Fellowship in Land Value Taxation by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass. During 2006, the award of $40,000 will support some of her ongoing research on urban growth and property development through her project “Municipal Fiscal Structures and Land-Based Growth in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area.” After documenting heavy reliance on sales taxes relative to property taxes, Heim will examine implications of the quest for sales tax revenues, including municipal incentives offered to attract retail facilities and the possibility of excessive zoning for commercial uses or overbuilding of retail facilities. She will investigate fiscal issues relating to infrastructure finance during rapid growth and consequences of build-out, including higher prices for land acquisition for public purposes.

Professor Heim, who earned a PhD from Yale in 1982, is primarily interested in economic history and urban/regional economics and policy. Widely published, she has studied decline in older industrial regions and spatial policies in Europe and the United States.  She has received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Current research interests include city building, property developers, and land-use policy in U.S. metropolitan areas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work on Phoenix has included examination of urban sprawl, growth management, and annexation.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is a nonprofit and tax-exempt educational institution founded in 1974 to improve the quality of public debate and decisions in the areas of land policy and land-related taxation. The Institute aims to integrate theory and practice to better shape land policy and to provide a nonpartisan forum for discussion of the multidisciplinary forces that influence public policy. Inspired by the work of Henry George as expressed in the book Progress and Poverty (1879), the Lincoln Institute introduces his thinking and ideas into the contemporary land and tax policy debate to advance a more equitable and productive society. The David C. Lincoln Fellowship in Land Value Taxation, established in 1999, encourages scholars and practitioners to undertake new work in this field that adds to the body of knowledge and understanding of land value taxation as a component of contemporary fiscal systems.

February 27, 2006