The Price of Silence

Marianna Magagnoli () and Filippo Tassinari ()
Additional contact information
Marianna Magagnoli: Universitat de Barcelona & IEB
Filippo Tassinari: Universitat Pompeu Fabra & BSE & IEB

No 2025/10, Working Papers from Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB)

Abstract: This paper studies the causal impact of street noise on housing prices. It focuses on a very dense urban environment and its entire soundscape, using granular data on listed flats and street noise. We employ a combination of hedònic price and fixed effects model, exploiting the regular grid shape of the Eixample district, in Barcelona. Our results indicate that doubling the perceived street noise generates an average depreciation of 3.4% on sales and 2% on rents. We show that the lower semi-elasticity with which the rental market adjusts for the negative externality is associated with a higher turnover of tenants in louder streets. Moreover, we collect several pieces of evidence which suggest that the effect is not driven by sorting by neighbors. Lastly, we use our results to perform two costbenefit analyses of policies which help reducing noise. Based on our findings, we formulate policy recommendations and highlight specific interventions that can mitigate the negative impact of urban noise.

Keywords: Cities; housing prices; noise (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R31 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ieb.ub.edu/publication/2025-10-the-price-of-silence/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2025-10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().