Studying the Impacts of Environmental Amenities and Hazards with Nationwide Property Data: Best Data Practices for Interpretable and Reproducible Analyses

Abstract

Access to rich, nationwide property data has catalyzed rapid empirical work concerning land use choices in several fields of inquiry, including environmental economics, urban geography, and conservation biology. When data on property transactions and assessments are provided in its original or only partially pre-processed state, the accuracy, reliability, and generalizability of findings can be improved with a series of cleaning procedures and quality checks. We discuss issues inherent in using increasingly popular, nationwide data to perform econometric analyses and propose best practices for data preparation by example of ZTRAX, a U.S.-wide real estate database available to academics, non-profit, and government researchers between 2016 and 2023. We cover (1) the identification of arms-length sales, (2) the geo-location of parcels and buildings, (3) temporal linkages between transaction, assessor, and parcel data, (4) the identification of property types, such as single-family homes and vacant lands, and (5) dealing with missing or mismeasured data for standard housing attributes. We provide supplementary maps, filtering tables, and algorithmic descriptions to help analysts check and document their choices, improve the quality of ongoing and planned research, and help readers better understand the scope, reliability, and generalizability of findings and data products.