The Windy City: Property Value Impacts of Wind Turbines in an Urban Setting

By Corey Lang, J. Opaluch, George Sfinarolakis. 2014

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines the impact of wind turbines on house values in Rhode Island. In contrast to wind farms surrounded by sparse development, in Rhode Island single turbines have been built in relatively high population dense areas. As a result, we observe 48,554 single-family, owner-occupied transactions within five miles of a turbine site, including 3254 within one mile, which is far more than most related studies. We estimate hedonic difference-in-differences models that allow for impacts of wind turbines by proximity, viewshed, and contrast with surrounding development. Across a wide variety of specifications, the results suggest that wind turbines have no statistically significant negative impacts on house prices, in either the post public announcement phase or post construction phase. Further, the lower bound of statistically possible impacts is still outweighed by the positive externalities generated from CO2 mitigation.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3fdbf42cd2a1c39a5cef3b9fa4700ed4b950a5ef

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Christian Krekel
2. S. Gibbons
3. Alexander Zerrahn
4. Stephen Machin
5. Olmo Silva
6. Jaren C. Pope
7. Shihe Fu

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Alexander Zerrahn
2. Christian Krekel
3. S. Gibbons

Citations in the corpus

• Does the presence of wind turbines have negative externalities for people in their surroundings? Evidence from well-being data (2017, background): “Other studies do not detect significant effects (Lang et al., 2014; Sims et al., 2008).”
• Gone with the wind: Valuing the visual impacts of wind turbines through house prices (2015, background): “One study with a larger housing sample size Lang et al (2014), looks at 10 small-scale wind farms in suburban and urban locations in Rhode Island, all but one of which are single-turbine sites.”