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CLEANING UP WEST VIRGINIA: WHAT'S IT WORTH? ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES
Citation:
WILLIAMSON, J. M. CLEANING UP WEST VIRGINIA: WHAT'S IT WORTH? ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES. Presented at Presentation at Miami University, Oxford, OH, September 20, 2006.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public
Description:
In this presentation I discuss cleanup of AMD impaired waterways in the Cheat River Watershed of West Virginia from an economic standpoint. Appalachian states have an especially large number of contaminated streams and rivers, and the USGS places AMD as the primary source of water-quality degradation in the region. More than 5,000 miles of streams and rivers there are impacted by AMD. I derive non-use values for AMD using 21 years of housing sales data, spanning 1985 - 2005, and use geographic information systems (GIS) to link housing market sales data with stream water quality. The richness the data allow us to control for housing attributes such as the number of rooms of the house, bathrooms, stories, size of the house in square footage, as well as amenities of the house such as air conditioning, all of which contribute to the value of the house. Using the variation in sales prices and water quality, we develop WTP estimates of the price impact of water quality.