Taxes create incentives; yet, the potency of these incentives may depend on the salience and households’ perceptions of the tax itself. We investigate this issue in the context of property taxes, exploring how accurately households perceive their property tax liabilities and what factors...

The property tax was originally intended to be a tax on the stock of wealth, in essence all property – real and personal, tangible and intangible. Estimating the property tax base without any exemptions or other legal deviations from market value is an exercise that permits the discussion to...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to explore the willingness to pay to improve the accuracy of property assessment and three related issues regarding attitudes toward these assessments and taxes. First, we explore individual willingness to pay to improve property assessment accuracy; a more...

In this paper we propose a new IV estimator to be used in detecting vertical property tax inequity. We conduct Monte Carlo experiments to evaluate the bias of this estimator in comparison to traditional linear and log-linear regression based estimators. We find that the new estimator is more...

This paper investigates the simultaneous relationship between tax rates and city property tax bases using data for 86 large U.S. cities in 1967, 1972, 1977, and 1982. We find that a 10 percent increase in the city's property tax rate decreases the city's tax base by about 1.5 percent. In...

Detroit is experiencing historic levels of property tax foreclosure. More than 100,000 properties, or one-in-four throughout the city, have been foreclosed upon for nonpayment of property taxes since 2011. Simultaneously, there is strong evidence that the City is over assessing homeowners in...