Elasticita daně z nemovitosti v České republice

The main motivation of this thesis is to investigate whether, as already claimed by early economists such as Ricardo, the property tax is indeed the ideal tax because of perfectly inelastic tax base. For this purpose, I estimate the revenue elasticity of the property tax with respect to tax rates in the Czech Republic using municipality-level data on property tax revenue, tax rates and municipality characteristics during the period of 2004 to 2017. The research design exploits a variation in tax rates across municipalities and years caused by a policy change in 2008 when municipalities obtained an option to multiply the final tax liability of taxpayers by a so-called local coefficient. Using difference-in-differences estimator, I find the total revenue elasticity to be 0.76, while theoretically it should be one under perfectly inelastic tax base. However, further analysis indicates that the less-than-one elasticity is primarily due to substantial exemptions rather than behavioural responses in the tax base.