Subway boosts housing values, for whom: A quasi-experimental analysis

Abstract

This study investigates the property price premium brought by the opening of a subway to illustrate temporal dynamics and heterogeneous mechanism of property value effects. The estimation of changes caused by subways on property value can aid in assessing the benefits of public transit investments well. On the basis of residential property transaction records in Hangzhou, China in 2009–2013, hedonic models in a difference-in-differences framework are applied to handle certain endogeneity problems of estimation by eliminating unobserved factors. Results show that treatment groups located within 1000 m of a subway have an average price increase of 444 yuan per m2 from the opening of Line1. High-cost houses constantly gain significant increment and their price premium regress during the research period. However, for their counterparts in low-cost communities, the insignificant price effects are negative for a short time, and then become positive. The generalized results are robust when subway radius is adjusted.