Do residents care about urban dumps? Evidence from individual housing transaction data

More waste dumps are urgently needed to better cope with the surge of urban garbage and alleviate the ecological pressure on existing dumps. However, such dumps have environmental externalities. Housing transaction data and waste treatment plant data in Beijing from 2015 to 2018 were combined in this study for use in the hedonic price model to evaluate these externalities. We focus on the effects of new dumps, rather than existing dumps, on housing prices in surrounding areas to better control for omitted variable bias. The results of the difference-in-differences model show that new dumps would significantly decrease nearby housing prices by 5.82%. Our results further infer that the economic loss of the district where these new dumps are located will be at least $46.3 billion (in 2015 U.S. dollars). The above results indicate that the government should consider the adverse impacts on the surrounding residents when building new dumps.

Automated summary

This study combined housing transaction data and waste treatment plant data in Beijing from 2015 to 2018 to evaluate the effects of new waste dumps on nearby housing prices using a hedonic price model. The results showed that the establishment of new dumps would significantly decrease housing prices in surrounding areas, indicating that the government should take into consideration the adverse impacts on residents when building new waste dumps.