Publications:
The Assessment Gap: Racial Inequalities in Property Taxation (download) (Online Appendix)
with Carlos Avenancio-Leon; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022. 137(3), 1383-1434
We document a nationwide "assessment gap" which 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 inequality into between- and within-neighborhood components and find just over half of the inequality 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 over-taxation of highly minority communities. We also find appeals behavior and appeals outcomes differ by race. Inequality does not arise from either (i) racial differences in transaction prices or (ii) differences in features of the housing stock.
Assessment Caps and the Racial Assessment Gap (download) (Online Appendix)
with Carlos Avenancio-Leon; National Tax Journal, 2022, 75(1): 169-200
We show that legislative caps on assessment growth are associated with reduced racial inequality in property taxation. These reductions increase in treatment intensity and are largest in highly-minority neighborhoods and low-income neighborhoods, which prior work shows are more susceptible to assessment misvaluations. We provide support for two channels explaining this finding. First, conditional on a binding cap, Black and Hispanic homeowners are exposed to slightly higher home price growth within jurisdiction, which leads to a small mechanical reduction of existing inequality. Second, caps appear to discipline assessor errors by reducing the correlation between neighborhood amenities and erroneously high assessments.
Work in Progress:
How Do Labor Shortages Affect Residential Construction and Housing Affordability? (download) (Online Appendix)
with Mengqi Wang and Dayin Zhang
US housing markets have faced a secular shortage of housing supply in the past decade, contributing to a steady decline in housing affordability. Most supply-side explanations in the literature have tended to focus on the distortionary effect of local housing regulations. This paper provides novel evidence on a less explored channel affecting housing supply: shortages of construction labor. We exploit the staggered rollout of a national increase in immigration enforcement to identify negative shocks to construction sector employment that are likely unrelated to local housing market conditions. Treated counties experience large and persistent reductions in construction workforce, residential homebuilding, and increases in home prices. Further, evidence suggests that undocumented labor is a complement to domestic labor: deporting undocumented construction workers reduces labor supplied by domestic construction workers on both extensive and intensive margins.
The Racial Politicization of the Safety Net (download)
with Carlos Avenancio-Leon and William Mullins
We show that the introduction of the Food Stamp Program drove long-run political polarization across racial groups. Using voter roll data for the entire US, we show that individuals of voting age at the time of the program's rollout (1961-1975) diverge along racial lines in their likelihood of voting and registering as Republicans or Democrats up to a half-century later. Our design ensures that these findings are not driven by geographic or age-specific racial trends. Critically, these diverging patterns on average benefited Republicans. We also explore mechanisms. First, we show that access to the safety net also had short-run effects consistent with racial politicization on voter turnout, voter registration, and changes in the ideological composition of Congress. Second, we explore the interaction between Food Stamps and contemporaneous events such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, religious prevalence, and recessions.
Who Bears the Incidence of the Corporate Property Tax? with Francis Wong
Are Unfunded Public Pension Liabilities Capitalized in Local Real Estate Markets?