ownership drops below 20%. These findings highlight the stark gender disparities in high-value property ownership, which are important to consider in the wealth distribution and gender equity literature.

Second, we conduct a detailed analysis of property tax compliance by gender and find that men and women are equally likely to pay their property tax bills. A key advantage of studying property taxes is that evasion is directly observed: owners are billed based on cadastral valuation, and we observe whether they pay or not. We characterize tax payment rates for women and men, examining how these rates vary across the wealth distribution, proxied by the properties’ assessed value. We document substantial evasion, with slightly lower rates for women-owned properties (46%) compared to men-owned (48.5%).<sup>1</sup> The property tax gap is economically significant, amounting to roughly 8% of total municipal spending or the equivalent of the entire local public safety budget. On-time payment rates increase with property value, ranging from about 35% in the first percentile to 60% in the top percentile, though they remain similar for men and women across the distribution. However, women face slightly higher effective tax rates than men, driven by ownership of lower-value properties and a _de jure_ regressive tax schedule. We also document a small but statistically significant difference in payment methods: women are slightly less likely to use electronic means to pay property taxes, even after controlling for age.

Third, we examine gender-specific responses to (soft) tax enforcement measures. We estimate the effects of personalized tax letters on current, past, and subsequent property tax payments for women and men by leveraging a large-scale field experiment conducted by Cruces, Tortarolo, and Vazquez-Bare (2023) in October 2020.<sup>2</sup> The intervention, launched amid the COVID-19 pandemic, sought to address a sharp decline in property tax payments driven by economic disruptions and lockdown measures. It consisted of sending a one-page personalized letter to randomly selected residences, providing information on the October 2020 bill (amount due and due date), past due debt, and online or in-person payment instructions.

Our causal analysis indicates that men and women respond similarly to personalized property tax letters. First, the letter recipients are substantially more likely to pay the October 2020 tax bill on time compared to those in the control group, with no statistically significant gender differences. For women, payment rates increased by 4.2 percentage points, a 12% rise from the control baseline of 35%. For men, the increase was 4.7 percentage points, representing a 13.5% improvement over their control baseline. The granularity of our data also allows us to examine

> 1. The average delinquency rates align with those reported for other Latin American economies (e.g., see Brockmeyer, Estefan, Ramírez Arras, and Suárez Serrato, 2021; Kresch, Walker, Best, Gerard, and Naritomi, 2023; Kapon, Del Carpio, and Chassang, 2024; Castro and Scartascini, 2015).

> 2. Cruces et al. (2023) use the campaign to study spillovers in property tax compliance across treated and untreated neighborhoods, but do not explore gender-specific effects.

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