Occupant Well-Being and House Values

Richard Rijnks and Stephen Sheppard

No 2019-23, Department of Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics, Williams College

Abstract: Recent research indicates that the subjective evaluation of well-being increases when conditions of housing are improved. This suggests that subjective well-being might serve as a useful proxy for characteristics of a home or neighbourhood that are relevant to an occupant, but unobserved by the analyst. In this paper, we assess this idea through analysis of residential property valuation, using a sample of 95,413 respondents matched to house sales for 2000 to 2012 in the North of the Netherlands. Using a spatial econometric approach, we find a significant and positive association between individual and regional subjective well-being and house prices. This suggests that house buyers are willing to pay more for, or that house sellers require greater compensation to sell and move from, properties and areas in which the resident experiences greater happiness. Our study provides the first estimates of the importance of these effects.

Keywords: Subjective well-being; house price; hedonic model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 R2 R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2019-10-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-ure
Note: This is a revision of WP 2018-05
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/Occupant_Well_Being_and_House_ValuesWP.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Occupant Well-Being and House Values (2020)
Working Paper: Occupant Well-Being and House Values (2018)
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:wil:wileco:2019-23

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

The price is Free.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics, Williams College Williamstown, MA 01267. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Greg Phelan ().