The Impact of Property Taxes and Property Tax Classification on Business Activity in the Chicago Metropolitan Area

The City of Chicago and the inner suburbs grew much more slowly than the outer suburbs in recent decades. In the central county of the metropolitan area, commercial and industrial property is "classified," in that it is assessed at a higher ratio of market value than residential property. Classification is not used in the surrounding suburban counties. The empirical analysis finds evidence consistent with the notion that property tax classification contributes to differential rates of economic growth. High property tax rates lead to significantly slower growth rates for employment, commercial property, and industrial property.     

Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry

A model of culture as a partially coherent system of signs comprised the most widely employed instrument for analyzing cultural meaning among the new cultural historians. However, the model failed to account for meanings that agents produce by executing social practices rather than by only "reading" contrasts among signs. It also encouraged some analysts to conceive the difference between sign system and concrete practice as that between what is graspable as an intellectual form and what remains inaccessibly material or corporeal. This essay introduces three exemplars of the ties between signs and practices to show how the pragmatics of using signs comprises a structure and a generator of meaning in its own right. In the three exemplars, which are based on the tropes of metonymy, metaphor, and irony, I employ the analytic tools of linguistics to appreciate the non-discursive organization of practice. Analysis of the diverse logics for organizing practice offers promising means for investigating how signs come to seem experientially real for their users. Finally, this view of culture in practice suggests new hypotheses about the possible interdependencies as well as the lack of connection among the elements of a cultural setting.