Research

This paper studies the causal impact of street noise on housing prices. It focuses on a very dense urban environment and its entire soundscape, using granular data on listed flats and street noise. We employ a combination of hedonic price and fixed effects model, exploiting the regular grid shape of the Eixample district, in Barcelona. Our results indicate that doubling the perceived street noise generates an average depreciation of 3.4% on sales and 2% on rents. We show that the lower semi-elasticity with which the rental market adjusts for the negative externality generates a higher turnover of tenants in louder streets. Moreover, we collect several pieces of evidence which suggest that the effect is not driven by sorting by neighbors. Lastly, we use our results to perform two cost-benefit analyses of policies which help reducing noise.

In the context of increasing urban bike use, this paper examines the impact of cycling infrastructure—cycle lanes and bike-sharing stations—on housing prices. To address potential identification challenges linked to the location of these infrastructures, we leverage the staggered implementation of cycle lanes and the opening of bike-sharing stations in a grid-shaped neighborhood of Barcelona. Using unique geolocated data from 2007 to 2019, we analyze housing price variations across concentric rings of increasing distance from each dwelling. By examining origin-destination trips from the bike-sharing service and employing least-cost path computation, we estimate bike traffic on each street segment. This serves as a proxy for bike-friendliness and connectivity within the wider cycling network, allowing us to assess whether cycling traffic affects housing prices to varying extents. Our findings show that cycling infrastructure and traffic positively influence both rents and sales, particularly near dwellings, with the effect diminishing over distance.

This paper studies whether vertical construction can help reduce the urban heat island effect while keeping population density high. The underlying hypothesis is that vertical construction could imply, for a constant population size, less land consumption and more green space. As the latter decreases temperature, building height could represent an important dimension for the adaptation of cities to climate change. Moreover, if buildings’ height allowed to keep population density high while decreasing temperature, it would imply a lower cost of density for unaltered agglomeration economies. I study this using the Spanish cadaster combined with satellite data on population density and temperature.