Gender Bias and Property Taxes

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Burtch, Gordon, Zentner, Alejandro
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Burtch, Gordon
Zentner, Alejandro
author_facet Burtch, Gordon
Zentner, Alejandro
contents Gender bias distorts the economic behavior and outcomes of women and households. We investigate gender biases in property taxes. We analyze records of more than 100,000 property tax appeal hearings and more than 2.7 years of associated audio recordings, considering how panelist and appellant genders associate with hearing outcomes. We first observe that female appellants fare systematically worse than male appellants in their hearings. Second, we show that, whereas male appellants' hearing outcomes do not vary meaningfully with the gender composition of the panel they face, those of female appellants' do, such that female appellants obtain systematically lesser (greater) reductions to their home values when facing female (male) panelists. Employing a multi-modal large language model (M-LLM), we next construct measures of participant behavior and tone from hearing audio recordings. We observe markedly different behaviors between male and female appellants and, in the case of male appellants, we find that these differences also depend on the gender of the panelists they face (e.g., male appellants appear to behave systematically more aggressively towards female panelists). In contrast, the behavior of female appellants remains relatively constant, regardless of their panel's gender. Finally, we show that female appellants continue to fare worse in front of female panels, even when we condition upon the appelant's in-hearing behavior and tone. Our results are thus consistent with the idea that gender biases are driven, at least in part, by unvoiced beliefs and perceptions on the part of ARB panelists. Our study documents the presence of gender biases in property appraisal appeal hearings and highlights the potential value of generative AI for analyzing large-scale, unstructured administrative data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_12610
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Gender Bias and Property Taxes
Burtch, Gordon
Zentner, Alejandro
General Economics
Economics
Computers and Society
Gender bias distorts the economic behavior and outcomes of women and households. We investigate gender biases in property taxes. We analyze records of more than 100,000 property tax appeal hearings and more than 2.7 years of associated audio recordings, considering how panelist and appellant genders associate with hearing outcomes. We first observe that female appellants fare systematically worse than male appellants in their hearings. Second, we show that, whereas male appellants' hearing outcomes do not vary meaningfully with the gender composition of the panel they face, those of female appellants' do, such that female appellants obtain systematically lesser (greater) reductions to their home values when facing female (male) panelists. Employing a multi-modal large language model (M-LLM), we next construct measures of participant behavior and tone from hearing audio recordings. We observe markedly different behaviors between male and female appellants and, in the case of male appellants, we find that these differences also depend on the gender of the panelists they face (e.g., male appellants appear to behave systematically more aggressively towards female panelists). In contrast, the behavior of female appellants remains relatively constant, regardless of their panel's gender. Finally, we show that female appellants continue to fare worse in front of female panels, even when we condition upon the appelant's in-hearing behavior and tone. Our results are thus consistent with the idea that gender biases are driven, at least in part, by unvoiced beliefs and perceptions on the part of ARB panelists. Our study documents the presence of gender biases in property appraisal appeal hearings and highlights the potential value of generative AI for analyzing large-scale, unstructured administrative data.
title Gender Bias and Property Taxes
topic General Economics
Economics
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12610