Abstract:

This paper discusses a serious environmental problem in China—urban air pollution, which not only harms the health of residents, but also causes loss of household wealth accumulation, with an even greater impact on cities in northern China. Taking a variety of air pollutants and urban housing price panel data as research sample, we use the centralized winter heating policy north of the Qinling-Huaihe River line as a quasi–natural experiment, and employ geographic regression discontinuity to explore in depth the impact of air pollution on urban housing prices. The results indicate that there is a significant negative correlation between air pollution and urban housing prices, that is, air pollution inhibits the rise of urban housing prices. With an average increase of 1 unit in PM2.5 concentration, housing prices will depreciate by 1.50%, resulting in an average loss of about 100897.94 million yuan in national economic value during the sample period. The results of heterogeneity analysis show that the inhibitory effect of air pollution on housing prices is more pronounced in cities with poor infrastructure, high degree of marketization and small scale. In addition, this paper innovatively explores the potential mechanisms of air pollution affecting housing prices from both supply and demand perspectives, and the findings confirm that air pollution mainly has a negative impact on housing prices through factors such as population migration and land prices. This research helps to improve the public's understanding of the impact of air pollution on the capitalization of urban housing prices, the willingness to pay for improving air quality, and provide a basis for the government to formulate public policies for air governance.

Key words:

air pollution, urban housing price, regression discontinuity (RD), centralized heating, loss of wealth

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