ONLINE: The Assessment Gap: Racial Inequalities in Property Taxation

press release: Seminar Series talk, via Zoom. RSVP.

Using panel data covering 118 million homes in the United States and geolocation detail for 75,000 taxing entities, Assistant Professor Troup Howard and Carlos Avenancio-León of Indiana University documented a nationwide "assessment gap." Howard will discuss how this gap leads local governments to place a disproportionate fiscal burden on racial and ethnic minorities.

Howard and his colleague found that holding jurisdictions and property tax rates fixed, black and Hispanic residents face a 10 percent to 13 percent higher tax burden for the same bundle of public services. He will describe two channels that give rise to this assessment gap: insufficient capitalization of neighborhood attributes into assessments and racial differences in assessment appeals outcomes.

Howard and his co-author propose an alternate approach for constructing assessments and show that this would reduce inequality by at least 55 percent to 70 percent.

Troup Howard is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business. 

Howard's research explores how regional economic outcomes and household finances are affected by the fiscal choices of state and local governments, with particular attention to public debt and taxation. In his recent work, he documents widespread racial and ethnic inequality in local property taxes.

He also studies the common practice of providing corporate tax subsidies as an economic development incentive, the temporal link between local public debt and tax rates, and how early-lifetime experiences shape the future fiscal and legislative leanings of U.S. Congress members.