Housing price responses to newspaper publicity of hazardous waste sites

Abstract

This paper uses housing market data to examine the relationship between newspaper coverage of local hazardous waste sites and housing prices. We explore a range of measures of newspaper publicity, including the number of Superfund-related articles, the number of such articles that focus on the risk levels at the sites, and the number of such articles that appear on page one or section A. We restrict our sample to those houses sold more than once in order to eliminate confounding timE−invariant determinants of housing price. Our findings indicate a price increase of approximately US$ 100–200 per article, which could suggest that the publicity either led residents to lower their perceptions of risk or led them to increase their expectations of a clean-up (or both).