Impacts of rail transit access on land and housing values in China: a quantitative synthesis

Rail transit investment has been viewed as a prominent policy instrument for local and regional development. However, little is known about to what extent the theorised changes in land and housing values arising from rail transit access can be substantiated by evidence in a large developing country context. This paper presents a quantitative review of empirical studies that analysed the impacts of rail transit access on land and housing values in China. We review empirical analyses in 67 studies from 1997 to 2018 for which we encode quantitative results along with a range of theoretically combinations of spatially contextual characteristics, data and methodological-design characteristics. The results show that there are significant variations in the size estimates of effects of rail transit access across studies. Such variations are associated with rail project types, data and methodological designs. Our study provides the insights on what has already been known and what needs to be known on evaluating real estate consequences of rail transit improvements in developing countries.