Economics professor earns fellowship for tax incentives research

Dr. Shawn M. Rohlin, assistant professor of economics in the Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences, has been selected to receive a fellowship award from the Lincoln Land Institute for his research on location-based tax incentives.

The David C. Lincoln Fellowships in Land Value Taxation (LVT) were established in 1999 to develop academic and professional interest in the topic through the support of major research projects. The program encourages scholars and practitioners to undertake new work in the field, either in the basic theory of LVT or its applications as a component of contemporary fiscal systems in countries throughout the world.

"This is a great honor for Shawn and provides further external validation about the importance of his research on regional tax policy," said Dr. Michael Nelson, chair of the Department of Economics.

Rohlin's research examines how offering location-based tax incentives to an area affects quality of life and business environment through changes in land values and equilibrium wages. This is one of the first projects of its kind to analyze a tax policy that affects only a subset of a metropolitan area by showing that quality of life methodologies can be applied using small geographically-aggregated data, such as census block groups.

Media contact: Kelly Daw, 330-972-7225 or kdaw@uakron.edu.