Despite minority homeowners facing a disproportionate property tax burden, they are less likely to take action to reduce their taxes by filing an appeal. We use two field experiments, one with homeowners and the other with county assessors, to understand the drivers of inequality in property taxes and homeowner appeal behavior. In a survey experiment with Indiana homeowners, we show that information frictions and perceived discrimination contribute to the racial appeal gap. We additionally find racial differences in the treatment of homeowners by assessors based on both appeal outcomes and through a complementary correspondence study where assessors are less likely to provide aid to minority homeowners who want to appeal. This provides additional evidence of discrimination. Additionally, we consider the gender appeal gap, and document unequal treatment between female and male homeowners by assessors. Overall, our results indicate that appeals are not effective at reducing biases in assessments.

Centralization of public goods with spillovers limits free-riding and increases provision, but general equilibrium responses to changes across space can undermine its value. This paper considers this trade-off for community colleges. In Texas, the level of centralization has increased over time as school districts voted to join their local college's tax base and coalition to provide these services. School districts that joined, as well the original tax base, saw higher aggregate property values after these geographic expansions, suggesting more centralization is beneficial. I then estimate a general equilibrium model to understand the optimal level of centralization in the Austin MSA. Pure centralization, where all school districts join the coalition, increases average yearly household welfare by $29 ($23M overall) but is not optimal because household sorting responses adversely affect the housing market. There are 11,065 feasible intermediate levels of centralization, that include only some school districts, that raise welfare by more.

When minimum wages increase, discriminating employers may try to avoid regulatory burdens by substituting away from disadvantaged workers. We test this hypothesis using a resume correspondence study with 35,000 applications around three ex-ante uncertain minimum wage changes. Before the increases, applicants with distinctively Black names were 19% less likely to receive a callback than equally qualified applicants with distinctively white names. Announcements of minimum wage hikes substantially reduce the callbacks for both types of applicants but shrink the racial callback gap by 80% for the subsequent year for which we have data. We interpret our results through a hiring model to show that the gap shrinks because white applicants are more likely to be marginal, partly due to statistical discrimination. We show how researchers or policymakers can use our framework, without policy variation, to predict how labor market policies will change racial disparities in other settings.

In modern economies, when debt and trust issues arise, a partial forgiveness policy is often the solution to induce payment and increase disclosure. For their part, governments around the globe continue to use tax amnesties as a strategy to allow debtors to make amends for past misdeeds in exchange for partial debt forgiveness. While ubiquitous, much remains unknown about the basic facts of how well amnesties work, for whom, and why. We present a simple theoretical construct that provides both economic clarity into tax amnesties as well as insights into the necessary behavioral parameters that one must estimate to understand the consequences of tax amnesties. We partner with the Dominican Republic Tax Authorities to design a natural field experiment that is linked to the theory to estimate key causal mechanisms. Empirical results from our field experiment, which covers 125,452 taxpayers who collectively owe $5.2 billion (5.5% of GDP) in known debt, highlight the import of deterrence laws, beliefs about future amnesties, and tax morale for debt payment and increased disclosure. Importantly, we find large short run effects: our most effective treatment (deterrence) increased payments of known debt by 25% and hidden debt by 48%. Further, we find no evidence of our intervention backfiring on subsequent tax payments.

How do college students and postsecondary institutions react to changes in skill demand in the U.S. labor market? We quantify the magnitude and nature of response in the 4-year sector using a new measure of labor demand at the institution-major level that combines online job ads with geographic locations of alumni from a professional networking platform. Within a shift-share setup, we find that the 4-year sector responds. We estimate elasticities for undergraduate degrees and credits centered around 1.3, generally increasing with time horizon. Changes in non-tenure-track faculty allocations and the credits they teach partially mediate this overall response. We provide further evidence that the magnitude of the overall response depends on both student demand and institutional supply-side constraints. Our findings illuminate the nature of educational production in higher education and suggest that policy efforts that aim to align human capital investment with labor demand may struggle to achieve such goals if they target only one side of the market.

We conduct three field experiments to understand the causes and consequences of polarized demand for government expenditure, using US state spending on public higher education as a concrete example. The first two experiments study polarization in taxpayer demand. We provide different types of information to shape beliefs about the social return on investment. Our treatments decrease the political partisan gap in ideal policies by up to 32\%, with differences in partisan reasoning from information as a key mediator. Information also affects how taxpayers communicate their ideal policies to elected officials, increasing their propensity to write a (positive) letter to an official of the other party---a reduction in affective polarization. In the third experiment, we send the taxpayers’ letters to a randomized subset of elected officials to study how polarization affects the supply of policies. Officials who receive their constituents’ demands engage more with higher education issues in our correspondences.