EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Assessment Gap: Racial Inequalities in Property Taxation

Carlos F Avenancio-León and Troup Howard

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022, vol. 137, issue 3, 1383-1434

Abstract: We document a nationwide “assessment gap” that leads local governments to place a disproportionate fiscal burden on racial and ethnic minorities. We show that holding taxing jurisdictions and property tax rates fixed, Black and Hispanic residents face a 10%–13% higher tax burden for the same bundle of public services. We decompose this disparity into between- and within-neighborhood components and find that just over half of it arises between neighborhoods. We then present evidence on mechanisms. Property assessments are less sensitive to neighborhood attributes than market prices are. This generates spatial variation in tax burden within jurisdiction and leads to overtaxation of communities with a high share of minority residents. We also find appeals behavior and appeals outcomes differ by race within neighborhood. Inequality does not arise from (i) racial differences in transaction prices or (ii) differences in features of the housing stock.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjac009 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:137:y:2022:i:3:p:1383-1434.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-27
Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:137:y:2022:i:3:p:1383-1434.