I am pleased to draw your attention to a paper recently published by the London School of Economics and Political Science titled “Wealth and Property Taxation in the United States”.

The Abstract to this 71-page erudite academic research paper states:

“We study the history and geography of wealth accumulation in the United States using newly collected historical property tax records from the early 1800s onward. These records come from the administration of the General Property Tax - a tax that aspired to cover all types of property. We construct wealth series at the state, county, and national levels. At the state level, we use annual assessed values of wealth from state-level reports drawn from multiple sources. Because assessed values may differ from market values, we also require assessment ratios, defined as the ratio of assessed to market wealth. We obtain state-level assessment ratios from decadal U.S. Census wealth data (drawn from various census reports, including those on “Wealth, Debt, and Taxation”), in which the census carried out detailed valuation work, complemented with information on changes in assessment practices from the state reports, to build higher-frequency series of assessment ratios.