My Taxes are Too Darn High: Why Do Households Protest their Taxes?

In all U.S. states, individuals can file a protest with the goal of legally reducing their property taxes. We study the motives for protesting taxes using administrative records and two sources of causal identification: a quasi-experiment and a large-scale natural field experiment. We show that, consistent with selfish motives, the decision to protest is highly elastic to the private benefits and private costs. We also find evidence of fairness motives: consistent with conditional cooperation, a higher perceived average tax rate decreases both perceived unfairness and the protest probability. Last, we compare protest behavior between Republican and Democratic households. In contrast to some survey data suggesting a large partisan divide in views about the government, we find only small partisan differences in our high-stakes, naturally occurring context.