Economics and Finance

Two counties in Pennsylvania handle delinquent property-tax payments in different manners. The first county has very strict regulations that include interest on the unpaid balance and eventually property seizure. The second county uses a more personal touch. Someone calls or visits the property owner to discuss the overdue bill and, if necessary, a payment schedule is created. A random sample of delinquent payments in each county was obtained, and the data were paired according to the size of the original property-tax bill. The amount of time (in months) until full payment was made was recorded for each property. Assume the distribution of pairwise differences is continuous and symmetric. Use the Wilcoxon signed-rank test to determine whether there is any evidence of a difference in median collection time due to the method of handling delinquent payments. Use a = 0.10, and find the p value associated with this test.