You are here:
Estimating the economic value of protecting water quality: Scaling benefits to the national level?
Citation:
Papenfus, M. Estimating the economic value of protecting water quality: Scaling benefits to the national level? PLACES Workshop, NA, Webinar, June 09, 2020.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation will outline my research on property value benefits analysis proposed in the current StRAP (SSWR 1.5.2). I will briefly discuss the work we did in the previous StRAP on a meta-analysis of property values studies examining water quality, identify the major gaps and challenges identified by the meta-analysis, and discuss my plans to use national level property sales data and satellite-derived water quality measures to move this literature forward.
Description:
The hedonic property value method is one of the primary methods used to estimate non-market values of environmental amenities including water quality. Property values studies combine data on behavioral outcomes or housing choices with data on water quality to estimate benefits in a statistical model. A recent meta-analysis of hedonic studies focused on water quality (Guignet, Heberling, Papenfus, Griot, & Holland, 2019) reveals limitations in terms of transferring the values estimated in one context to a new region or market where a primary study has not been conducted. One of the impediments of conducting a national level hedonic study in the past has been the lack of consistent property sales data and water quality data. This task proposes to build on the work of (Papenfus, 2018) and use water quality impairment data and property sales data available from Zillow research to develop a suite of consistent and uniform estimated across various regions of the country using modern econometric methods to identify the effect of water quality improvements on housing values. The outputs will serve to: • Build towards national estimates of water quality that could be used in cost-benefit analysis and be integrated into a hedonic module for evaluating water quality benefits • Contribute to the valuation literature on the transportability of nonmarket valuation estimates. • Provide states and local decision-makers with improved models to support watershed assessments, support the 303(d) TMDL program, and to improve our capacity to evaluate the effectiveness water quality regulations.