Measuring Housing Quality Using Revealed Preference: A Geographic PageRank Approach

Alex Bell, Sophie Calder-Wang and Shusheng Zhong

No 35294, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper introduces Geographic PageRank (GPR), an innovative measure of place quality that is based on migration decisions, employing a recursive algorithm that leverages the full network of migration flows. Using various public data sources, we construct GPR rankings for U.S. counties and metropolitan areas. We also extend the rankings to capture changes over time and differences for population subgroups, providing a versatile data product. As an application, we show that GPR can serve as an "anti-instrument'' for unobserved housing quality when pricing environmental amenities, recovering a correctly signed implicit price of air pollution that is in line with quasi-experimental benchmarks.

JEL-codes: C30 C39 Q5 Q53 R3 R31 R32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06
Note: EEE PE
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