Shale gas transmission and housing prices

In this study, we exploit residential property sales data in New York to value the external environmental costs of the proposed Constitution Pipeline, a high-capacity transmission pipeline designed to transport hydraulically-fractured natural gas in Pennsylvania to large northeastern markets. Results from difference-in-differences models suggest post-announcement price declines of 9% (similar to$12,000) for those properties located within three kilometers of the pipeline. These results are strongly robust to different specifications and subsets of the data, as well as falsification testing. Additionally, we find some evidence of attenuation in our treatment effect overtime, which is indicative of either declining salience or expectations of the pipeline over time. Our results suggest that homebuyer expectations of the environmental externalities of natural gas pipeline construction and operations are large and negative. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V.