PlumX Metrics
SSRN
Embed PlumX Metrics

The Assessment Gap: Racial Inequalities in Property Taxation

SSRN, ISSN: 1556-5068
2019
  • 13
    Citations
  • 6,605
    Usage
  • 24
    Captures
  • 2
    Mentions
  • 5
    Social Media
Metric Options:   Counts1 Year3 Year

Metrics Details

  • Citations
    13
    • Policy Citations
      8
      • Policy Citation
        8
    • Citation Indexes
      5
  • Usage
    6,605
    • Abstract Views
      5,404
    • Downloads
      1,201
  • Captures
    24
  • Mentions
    2
    • Blog Mentions
      1
      • Blog
        1
    • News Mentions
      1
      • News
        1
  • Social Media
    5
    • Shares, Likes & Comments
      5
      • Facebook
        5
  • Ratings
    • Download Rank
      35,437

Most Recent News

Narrowing the U.S. wealth gap is important. Narrowing the racial wealth gap is urgent.

Government support for building a middle class mostly bypassed people of African descent — who were deliberately, if often implicitly, denied the benefits.

Article Description

We use panel data covering 118 million homes in the United States, merged with geolocation detail for 75,000 taxing entities, to document a nationwide "assessment gap" which leads local governments to place a disproportionate fiscal burden on racial and ethnic minorities. We show that holding jurisdictions and property tax rates fixed, black and Hispanic residents nonetheless face a 10-13% higher tax burden for the same bundle of public services. This assessment gap arises through two channels. First, property assessments are less sensitive to neighborhood attributes than market prices are. This generates racially correlated spatial variation in tax burden within jurisdiction. Second, appeals behavior and appeals outcomes differ by race. This results in higher assessment growth rates for minority residents. We propose an alternate approach for constructing assessments based on small-geography home price indexes, and show that this reduces inequality by at least 55-70%.

Provide Feedback

Have ideas for a new metric? Would you like to see something else here?Let us know