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.

Media Coverage: Washington Post, New York Times, The Hill, Mother Jones, Washington Post, Econimate (video), Equitable Growth (brief), Psychology Today, Yahoo Finance/ABC (video), Non-Profit Quarterly, Education Week


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:


Cracking Down, Pricing Up: Housing Supply in the Wake of Mass Deportation (download)
with Mengqi Wang and Dayin Zhang; Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Finance

This paper explores how immigration policy affects residential construction and home prices. Using a staggered-rollout design, we show that increased immigration enforcement reduces homebuilding and drives up new construction prices. Existing stock prices reflect some downward pressure from reduced demand, however upward supply-side pressure dominates in most neighborhoods--except those with the highest share of undocumented residents. Exploring mechanisms, we find a significant loss of undocumented workers in construction, and that domestic workers do not provide one-to-one replacement. Instead, undocumented labor appears to complement domestic labor resulting in net job losses for US-born workers, especially in higher-skilled occupations.

Media Coverage: New York Times, Washington Post, New York Times, The Economist, Fareed Zakaria/CNN (video), Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Reuters Foundation, KSL Utah, Denver Post, University of Utah (brief), Vox 
 

Dissecting Racial Politicization: Long-Run Evidence from the Food Stamp Program (download)
with Carlos Avenancio-Leon and William Mullins; Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics

Many public policies – such as those on immigration, welfare, and policing – consistently attract partisan political attention, often with a racial dimension. How a public policy becomes politicized along racial lines is the focus of this paper. We develop a framework in which political parties gain electoral advantage by framing policy in political terms. This shows that an ex-ante group-neutral policy can generate political polarization across different voter groups (e.g., by race), that polarization is larger for cohorts learning about the policy at its onset, and that polarization persists over time. We apply this framework to study the politicization of the Food Stamp program. Using voter roll data for the entire U.S., we show empirically that the introduction of the program increased political polarization across racial groups, that this racial polarization was larger for voters that experienced the FS rollout at its onset, and that this polarization persists today, about a half-century later. More specifically, 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, with this divergence present but decreasing among younger cohorts. Our design ensures that these findings are not driven by geographic or age-specific racial trends. We also explore contemporaneous effects and additional contributing factors. First, we show that access to the safety net also had short-run effects on voters’ beliefs and turnout, as well as on the ideological composition of Congress. Second, we explore the interaction between Food Stamps and contemporaneous events such as the Voting Rights Act 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?