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Essays on Environmental Regulation and Urban Redevelopment

Irwin, Nicholas Broc

Abstract Details

2016, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics.
Understanding the responses of households and housing markets to governmental policies and regulation is fundamentally important to shaping effective policy that improves social welfare. Public policies and subsequent private market responses influence both the intensity of development in the built environment and the spatial distribution of amenities across the landscape. This increases the desirability of some areas while diminishing the attractiveness of others, causing households to resort across space in a utility maximizing manner. As governments shape strategies to deal with an increasingly polluted environment and work to reinvigorate shrinking cities, it is supremely important that careful economic analysis evaluate these efforts to provide meaningful feedback for future policy decisions. Using spatially explicit data on housing parcels and distinct neighborhoods from the greater Baltimore, Maryland metropolitan region, my dissertation examines the household and neighborhood-level responses to governmental policies shaping green infrastructure and urban redevelopment while also studying how spatial spillovers drive the decision-making process of individual households to undertake private redevelopment. The common theme that unites my three essays is the use of spatially explicit data and modeling approaches for the research questions I pursue, all of which focus on a single geographic area. My first chapter investigates the capitalization of a particular type of green infrastructure – stormwater basins – into house prices. Some argue that such green infrastructure projects provide additional benefits generated by their natural features beyond the ecosystem services they generate through mitigating damaging stormwater runoff and filtering of pollutants. I use housing transactions data and exploit the spatial and temporal variations in basin placement and design in Baltimore County to uncover any price capitalization from basin proximity. I find that adjacency to basins leads to house prices that are consistently lower and that the effect of this price decrease accentuates as the basin ages. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first rigorous empirical examination of the capitalization of this type of green infrastructure into house prices and I conclusively show that, rather than generating additional benefits, basins generate an additional cost for proximate households. In my second chapter, I study the role a spatially targeted urban revitalization program in Baltimore, Maryland, has on neighborhood housing markets. Using a unique set of housing activity data coupled with neighborhood level data on demographics, the environment, and amenities, I exploit the implementation of the program, which created a preliminary list of neighborhoods to target for block-level vacant housing demolition and subsequently funded a selection of those neighborhoods to create a quasi-experimental model. My results show that neighborhoods receiving the program funding – the treated group – have a subsequently higher number of housing sales and housing renovations than the non-funded neighborhoods – the control group – but this effect only materializes when multiple projects receiving funding in a neighborhood. I also find that high levels of crime dampen the effectiveness of the program on neighborhood housing markets. In my third chapter, I focus on the role of spatial spillovers in the decision of individual homeowners to reinvest into their own housing stock. Using parcel level data from 2005-2008 in Baltimore, Maryland, I utilize a social interactions model to study the effect of previous neighboring renovations on the decision to renovate in the current period while controlling for underlying spatial correlation within the neighborhood. I find strong evidence of spatial spillovers in the renovation decision with an additional neighboring renovation increasing the likelihood of a renovation in the current period; results which are consistent across changing neighborhood size. The overall implications of my research are three-fold. Firstly, I find that the use of spatially explicit data, such as housing parcels, allows me to capture highly localized effects that introduce important sources of heterogeneity that would be overlooked without such data. Secondly, I find strong evidence that public policy creates spillovers that have the potential to generate positive multiplier effects that can magnify across broader spatial scales. Finally, I find that spatial relationships can be an important determinant on economic outcomes at both a parcel and neighborhood level.
Elena Irwin (Advisor)
H. Allen Klaiber (Committee Member)
Mark Partridge (Committee Member)
150 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Irwin, N. B. (2016). Essays on Environmental Regulation and Urban Redevelopment [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1480514900311229

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Irwin, Nicholas. Essays on Environmental Regulation and Urban Redevelopment. 2016. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1480514900311229.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Irwin, Nicholas. "Essays on Environmental Regulation and Urban Redevelopment." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1480514900311229

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)