Abstract
The US Environmental Protection Agency Brownfields Program awards grants to redevelop contaminated lands known as brownfields. This paper estimates cleanup benefits by combining administrative records for a nationally representative sample of brownfields with high-resolution, high-frequency housing data. With cleanup, we find that property values increase by an average of 5.0% to 11.5%. For a welfare interpretation that does not rely on the intertemporal stability of the hedonic price function, a double-difference matching estimator finds even larger effects of up to 15.2%. Our various specifications lead to the consistent conclusion that Brownfields Program cleanups yield positive, statistically significant, but highly localized effects on housing prices.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 197-241 |
| Number of pages | 45 |
| Journal | Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 1 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2017 by The Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- Brownfields
- Difference in differences
- Nearest neighbor matching
- Property value hedonics
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics and Econometrics
- Nature and Landscape Conservation
- Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law