La Dolce Vita: Hedonic Estimates of Quality of Life in Italian Cities

Emilio Colombo, Alessandra Michelangeli and Luca Stanca

No 201, Working Papers from University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper provides an assessment of quality of life in Italian cities using the hedonic approach. We analyze micro-level data for housing and labor markets to estimate compensating differentials for local amenities within five domains: climate, environment, services, society and economy. The estimated implicit prices are used to construct overall and domain-specific quality of life indices. We find that differences in amenities are reflected in substantial compensating differentials in housing prices, whereas the effects on wages are relatively small. Quality of life varies substantially across space and is strongly related to differences in public services and economic conditions. Overall, quality of life is highest in medium-sized cities of the Center-North, displaying relatively high scores in all the domains considered. Northern cities fare better with respect to services, social and economic conditions, while relatively worse for climate and environmental conditions.

Keywords: quality of life; hedonic prices; housing markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C4 D5 H4 J3 J6 P2 P3 Q2 R2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2010-12, Revised 2010-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-env, nep-hap, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.dems.unimib.it/repec/pdf/mibwpaper201.pdf First version, 2010 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: La Dolce Vita: Hedonic Estimates of Quality of Life in Italian Cities (2014)
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:mib:wpaper:201

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Matteo Pelagatti ().