Estimating the General Equilibrium Benefits of Large Policy Changes: The Clean Air Act Revisited

This paper reports the first comprehensive approach for measuring the general equilibrium willingness to pay for large changes in air quality. It is based on a well defined locational equilibrium model. The approach allows estimation of households' indirect utility function and the underlying distribution of household types. With these estimates it is possible to compute a new locational equilibrium and the resulting housing prices in response to exogenous changes in air quality. This permits construction of welfare measures which properly take into consideration the adjustments of households in equilibrium to non-marginal changes in air quality. These types of measures are outside the scope of more traditional approaches. The empirical approach of this paper provides, for the first time, an internally consistent framework for estimation and applied general equilibrium welfare analysis. We compute the general equilibrium willingness to pay for the changes in air quality between 1990 and 1995. We implement our empirical framework using data from Southern California, an area which has experienced dramatic improvements in air quality during the past 20 years. Our findings are by and large supportive for our approach and suggest that accounting for general equilibrium effects in applied welfare can be especially important.

Measuring the Impact of Air Quality on Housing Markets and Residential Choices in Southern California

No abstract.

Using Locational Equilibrium Models to Evaluate Housing Price Indexes

This paper analyses how the properties of locational equilibrium models can be used to evaluate approaches for constructing price indexes for heterogeneous houses. Housing markets play a key role in locational equilibrium models. Prices for houses determine that implicit costs that households bear when locating in a given community. We evaluate a variety of price indexes all relying on hedonic models for predicting interjurisdictional housing prices. The application uses a unique panel data set of housing transactions in Southern California. The rank predictions of different models are robust with respect to the hedonic model and the composite commodity definition used in aggregation. They do not depend significantly on the spatial or temporal definitions used to define the choice set of local housing markets. Finally, housing price estimates are strongly correlated with education and environmental amenities.

General Equilibrium Benefit Transfers for Spatial Externalities: Revisiting EPA's Prospective Analysis

Environmental policy analyses increasingly require the evaluation of benefits from large changes in spatially differentiated public goods. Such changes are likely to induce general equilibrium effects through changes in household expenditures and local migration, yet current practice "transfers" constant marginal values for even the largest changes. Moreover, it ignores important distributional effects of policy. This paper demonstrates that recently developed locational equilibrium models can provide transferable general equilibrium benefit measures. Our results suggest that taking account of the potential for adjustment and household heterogeneity is important. Applying benefits estimated from this method to the effect of the Clean Air Act amendments in Los Angeles, we find that the estimated annual general equilibrium benefits in 2000 and 2010 are dramatically different by income group and location. The gains range from $33 to about$2,400 per household. These differences arise from variations in air quality conditions, income, and the effects of general equilibrium price adjustment