Why Do Households Protest their Property Taxes?

In the United States and many other countries, taxpayers can file a protest/appeal to legally reduce their property taxes. While tax protests can provide a unique opportunity to study the (un)willingness to pay taxes, they have received little attention from researchers. In the paper presented in this ZEW Research Seminar, the authors use the setting of property tax protests to provide revealed preferences evidence about reasons that affect the willingness to pay taxes from high stakes natural field experiments. They investigate reasons such as monetary considerations, filing frictions, including those driven by race and by the existence of a digital divide, tax morale, and fairness considerations.