Jaeyong (Danny) Han - Practice JMT
In My Backyard? Really? The Impact of Information Provision on Pollution Avoidance
Date: 10/04/2024 (Fri)
Time: 2:00pm- 3:00pm
Location: Seminar will be held on-site: Sanford 223 Rhodes Conference Room
Organizer: Jaeyong (Danny) Han
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
2:00pm - Seminar Presentation (2:00pm to 3:00pm)
Additional Comments: This paper investigates the impact of information provision through local news outlets to households in a hedonic model. Given the rise of the importance of local television news in the last two decades, I construct a comprehensive, novel dataset of local television, radio and newspaper coverage of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund sites across the country. I leverage the variation in coverage to recover the heterogeneity in impacts on housing prices and the willingness to pay of households to avoid living near the polluted areas. I find that houses that receive news coverage about a site close by see prices drop by more than three percent, while those without coverage do not. This paper provides evidence that households react more when they are better informed through local news coverage about nearby pollution, and that ignoring this critical dimension can significantly bias willingness to pay estimates.