Did the Land Transfer Tax Reduce Housing Sales in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The City of Toronto implemented a land transfer tax on real estate transactions in February 2008. We explore the impact of the tax on housing sales in the City of Toronto and the rest of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Previous research has shown that housing sales declined in Toronto once the City imposed the land transfer tax. This study, however, concludes that the negative impact of the tax on housing sales was statistically insignificant. Our approach differs from earlier studies in three ways. First, we highlight other influences on housing sales, in particular, the impact of the Great Recession, which overlapped with the imposition of the land transfer tax in Toronto, and the tightening of mortgage regulations in Canada that prevented lenders from issuing subprime mortgages. Second, we analyze the sale of both freehold and condominium properties in the GTA; previous research restricted analysis to freehold properties. Third, we take a regional perspective by contrasting any decline in housing sales in Toronto against an increase in sales in the suburban municipalities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".