Modeling the Property Price Impact of Water Quality in 14 Chesapeake Bay Counties

Patrick Walsh, Charles Griffiths, Dennis Guignet and Heather Klemick

No 201507, NCEE Working Paper Series from National Center for Environmental Economics, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Abstract: The Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries provide a range of recreational and aesthetic amenities, such as swimming, fishing, boating, wildlife viewing, and scenic vistas. Living in close proximity to the Bay improves access to these amenities and should be capitalized into local housing markets. We investigate these impacts in the largest hedonic analysis of water quality ever completed, with over 200,000 property sales across 14 Maryland counties. We use a spatially explicit water quality dataset, along with a wealth of landscape, economic, geographic, and demographic variables. These data allow a comprehensive exploration of the value of water quality, while controlling for a multitude of other influences. We also estimate several variants of the models most popular in current literature, with a focus on the temporal average of water quality. In comparing 1 year and 3 year averages, the 3 year averages generally have a larger implicit price. Overall, results indicate that water quality improvements in the Bay, such as those required by EPA’s Total Maximum Daily Load, could yield significant benefits to waterfront and near-waterfront homeowners.

Keywords: water quality; hedonic property value analysis; Chesapeake Bay; valuation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q51 Q53 Q57 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2015-12, Revised 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/workin ... ty-14-chesapeake-bay First version, 2015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Modeling the Property Price Impact of Water Quality in 14 Chesapeake Bay Counties (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nev:wpaper:wp201507

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