We use the closing of a big-box retail tenants under corporate bankruptcy to estimate the amenity value of losing neighborhood retail and service establishments. Our analysis provides evidence that the loss of a big box retailer leads to 11% decline in establishments within 0.1 mile and more modest effects up to 0.5 miles. This loss of commercial activity leads to a 1% decline in nearby home prices and this grows to 3% when focusing on retail centers that experienced the greatest loss of businesses after the bankruptcy. We further characterize how over 2,900 store locations transition in the decade following the bankruptcy and highlight that demolished and vacant locations generate the largest loss of amenities. We find limited evidence of any long-term recovery from this loss of local business amenities. Results have important policy implications for local governments attempting to mitigate the effects of the longer-term trend away from traditional big-box retail and towards online retailers and warehouse clubs and supercenters.

This paper investigates the value of urban trees by studying the effect of

cutting down trees on house prices. Using detailed data from the municipality

of Amsterdam we find an effect of 1.5 percent decrease in house

prices when a tree is cut-down in near proximity. We use a staggered

difference-in-difference approach to hedonic pricing analysis to account

for exogeneity.

Over the long-recovery since the Great Recession, US housing production has lagged significantly over previous recoveries. While there are many contributing factors, in this paper we focus on the role of amenities in shaping the amount and location of new housing units with a broad cross section of US metropolitan areas. We find that amenitized land, rather than all land may play a significant role in a developer's decision of what and where to build. We define amenitized land as land located within a particular travel distance to a collection of non-housing amenities. By buying a house, one buys a bundle of amenities -- both the physcial and parcel characteristics, but also an implied access to a set of locational amenities beyond the property boundary. We find that amenitized land is priced into house prices, and that amenitized land is necessary to consider alongside distance to the CBD when predicting housing prices. The results suggest that housing and land-use policies should incorporate the role of locational amenities and their spatial distribution within a metropolitan area.

Negative externalities negative impact house prices. In theory, mandating firms to internalize the costs from the externalities they induce should restore house prices to their previous equilibrium. However, there is no evidence suggesting that this is the case mainly because of a lack of data on private settlements over claims made by property owners. Using house transactions data from the Netherlands and detailed data on earthquakes induced by local gas extraction, coupled with two exogenous events that aid in identifying the effect from earthquakes and from compensations, namely the onset of the strongest earthquake to hit the region to date and a decision by a court of law that mandated the firm to compensate property owners for declining house prices in the region, I provide the first documentation of compensations privately settled between the firm and property owners having a positive impact on house prices. However, the effect is insufficient when compared to the impact exerted by the earthquakes. Results are robust to a number of specifications and robustness checks. I offer some mechanisms and use the data to suggest their validity.