We use the following data from different countries for our research. To run the econometrics model with panel data, we collect data through years 2006 to 2016.

- United States: data within the United States are mainly from U.S. Census Bureau. According to the literature, the most important variables include property tax revenue, GDP, population, public finance (i.e. federal transfers<sup>5</sup> ), property tax rate, household size, and governance quality.<sup>6</sup> U.S. data have the most variables and the best quality among the data we have collected.

- Canada: data are mainly collected from Statistics Canada, the statistics department of the government. Main variables include property tax revenue, GDP, population, public finance (i.e. federal transfers), and household size. Besides the United States, Canada is the only country that provides clear federal transfer data publicly online.

- Australia: Australian Bureau of Statistics has the main variables we need, including property tax revenue, GDP, population, and household size.

- Chile: variables for Chile are also property tax revenue, GDP, population, and household size, the same as Australia. And they are collected from the National Statistics Institute.

- OECD: data on OECD countries are all from the official OECD website. Variables are the same as for Australia and Chile, including property tax revenue, GDP, population, and household size.

# **IV. Methodology**

Most of the previous research simply use pooled Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), which is very likely to cause endogeneity (e.g. omitted variable bias), due to the different environments and situations in different countries (or states/provinces within a country). Since there exist some structural differences between countries, they are not consistently comparable using pooled OLS model. Therefore, we utilize Fixed Effects model<sup>7</sup> to estimate the impact of the important factors on property tax revenue, using only within-country (or within states/provinces) variations. This would provide a better estimator for the key determinants of property tax revenues even allowing extrapolation for developing countries.

> 5 Revenues of state and local governments that are received from federal government transfers. They are redistribution of income and wealth by means of the federal government making a payment, without goods or services being received in return. 6 The overall scores of the economic competitiveness for each state from The Beacon Hill Institute. The scores range from 1.9 to 8.1, with higher scores indicating better governance quality.

> 7 A fixed effects regression is an estimation technique employed in a panel data setting that allows researchers to control for time-invariant unobserved individual characteristics that can be correlated with the observed independent variables. It uses within-individual variations, so it is usually called “within estimator”. In our model, it controls for time-invariant unobserved individual characteristics within states/provinces in United States, Australia, Canada, and Chile, as well as within OECD countries. So, the results can be recognized as withinstate/province/country estimators.

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