TY  - JOUR
AU  - Greenstone,Michael
AU  - Gallagher,Justin
TI  - Does Hazardous Waste Matter? Evidence from the Housing Market and the Superfund Program
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11790
PY  - 2005
Y2  - November 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11790
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11790.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Michael Greenstone
MIT Department of Economics
50 Memorial Drive, E52-359
Cambridge, MA 02142-1347
Tel: 617/452-4127
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: mgreenst@mit.edu

Justin Gallagher
Case Western Reserve University
E-Mail: jpg75@case.edu
AB  - Approximately $30 billion (2000$) has been spent on Superfund clean-ups of hazardous waste sites, and remediation efforts are incomplete at roughly half of the 1,500 Superfund sites. This study estimates the effect of Superfund clean-ups on local housing price appreciation. We compare housing price growth in the areas surrounding the first 400 hazardous waste sites to be cleaned up through the Superfund program to the areas surrounding the 290 sites that narrowly missed qualifying for these clean-ups. We cannot reject that the clean-ups had no effect on local housing price growth, nearly two decades after these sites became eligible for them. This finding is robust to a series of specification checks, including the application of a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design based on knowledge of the selection rule. Overall, the preferred estimates suggest that the benefits of Superfund clean-ups as measured through the housing market are substantially lower than the $43 million mean cost of Superfund clean-ups.
ER  -