Cook County Residential Property Tax Appeals

This repo contains an analysis of residential property tax appeals in Cook County. This repo builds on work done in 2017 that identified issues with property tax appeals.

Repo structure

The structure of this repo is as follows:

• master.r can call each individual file
• Each file in the code folder executes a specific task, exporting material for use in the report
• The main report is in the root folder and knits outputs created from the files in the code folder

Primary questions

We want to know whether appeals, as administered by the Cook County Assessors' Office and Board of Review, improve the property tax system as a whole. Appeals can do this by:

• Increasing uniformity such that properties with similar market values are assessed similarly
• Increasing accuracy such that properties' assessed values more accurately reflect their true market values.
• Increasing fairness such that properties of different market values are assessed proportionately.

In addition, we want to identify gaps in transparency that frustrate this analysis.