Does hazardous waste matter?
Subtitle: evidence from the housing market and the Superfund Program
By: Michale Greenstone [and] Justin Gallagher
Contributors: Gallagher, Justin; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics
Series: Working paper series / Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics -- working paper 05-27; Working paper (Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics) -- no. 05-27.
Publisher: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 49
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. Keywords: Valuation of environmental goods, Hazardous waste sites, Environmental regulation, Regression discontinuity, Superfund, Externalities. JEL Classifications: H4, Q51, Q53, R5, R2, I18.
Notes: "October 31, 2005."

Includes bibliographical references (p. 46-49).

Abstract in HTML and working paper for download in PDF available via World Wide Web at the Social Science Research Network.