Does hazardous waste matter?
Subtitle: evidence from the housing market and the superfund program
By: Michael Greenstone, Justin Gallagher.
Contributors: Gallagher, Justin.; National Bureau of Economic Research.
Series: NBER working paper series ;; working paper 11790; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ;; working paper no. 11790.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Subjects: Hazardous waste site remediation -- Economic aspects -- United States.; Housing -- Prices -- United States.
Description: "Approximately $30 billion (2000$) has been spent on Superfund clean-ups of hazardous waste sites, and remediation efforts are incomplete at roughly half of the 1,500 Superfund sites.  This study estimates the effect of Superfund clean-ups on local housing price appreciation.  We compare housing price growth in the areas surrounding the first 400 hazardous waste sites to be cleaned up through the Superfund program to the areas surrounding the 290 sites that narrowly missed qualifying for these clean-ups.  We cannot reject that the clean-ups had no effect on local housing price growth, nearly two decades after these sites became eligible for them.  This finding is robust to a series of specification checks, including the application of a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design based on knowledge of the selection rule.  Overall, the preferred estimates suggest that the benefits of Superfund clean-ups as measured through the housing market are substantially lower than the $43 million mean cost of Superfund clean-ups"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Title from PDF file as viewed on 12/13/2005.
Also available in print.
System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.