Assessor Incentives and Property Assessment

Justin Ross

Southern Economic Journal, 2011, vol. 77, issue 3, 776-794

Abstract: While typically not a formulator of policy, property assessors are likely sensitive to political incentives, since they are either directly elected to their office or appointed by another elected official. This article estimates a model that is motivated by the assumption that assessors seek to maximize political support in a manner that affects the assessment‐to‐sales price ratio. With panel data from a 2001 to 2006 series of sales price ratio studies in Virginia cities and counties, a fixed effects variance‐decomposition regression reveals a variety of socioeconomic and political variables that bias the assessed value away from fair market value. In addition to finding influential socioeconomic factors, the results indicate that elected assessors underassess more than appointed assessors. Furthermore, it appears assessors try to export the property tax onto commercial property, and assessors in districts with higher measures of local government fiscal stress tend to give higher assessments.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.4284/sej.2011.77.3.776

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:wly:soecon:v:77:y:2011:i:3:p:776-794

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Southern Economic Journal from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().