Nber Working Paper Series China's Rising Demand for "green Cities": Evidence from Cross-city Real Estate Price Hedonics

With the decline of the traditional hukou system, migrants in China have a broad set of cities to choose from. Within an open system of cities, compensating differentials theory predicts that local real estate prices will reflect the marginal valuation of non-market local public goods. More polluted cities will feature lower real estate prices. But, local pollution may be caused by booming local industries. To address such endogeneity concerns, we estimate hedonic regressions using an instrumental variable strategy based on “imports” of pollution from nearby sources. By documenting the importance of spatial emissions patterns, our study highlights how real estate prices in one city are affected by Pigouvian externalities originating in another location. On average, a 10% decrease in imported neighbor pollution is associated with a 1.8% increase in local home prices. Siqi Zheng Institute of Real Estate Studies Department of Construction Management Tsinghua University Beijing 100084, P. R. China [email protected] Jing Cao School of Economics and Management Tsinghua University Haidian District, Beijing, 100084, China [email protected] Matthew E. Kahn UCLA Institute of the Environment Department of Economics Department of Public Policy Box 951496 La Kretz Hall, Suite 300 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1496 and NBER [email protected]