The Effect of Emission Information on Housing Prices: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register

Abstract

In this paper, we study whether the release of pollutant emission information has an effect on housing prices. The event under study is the publication of the first wave of emission quantity data from the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register in 2009. Our analysis is based on quarterly housing prices at the German postal code level for the years 2007–2011 and provides the first evidence from Europe on this research question. Estimating a differences-in-differences model and controlling for observable differences in land use, housing type distribution, tax revenues and other postal code area characteristics by means of propensity score matching, we find no significant effect of the release of emission information on the value of houses in affected postal code areas. This result survives a number of robustness checks designed to assess whether our findings are due to data aggregation issues or the actual treatment definition. This leads to the conclusion that on an aggregate level the 2009 publication of E-PRTR data did not have an immediate and noticeable effect on housing prices in Germany.