Valuing Public Goods Using Happiness Data: The Case of Air Quality

No 15156, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper describes and implements a method for estimating the average marginal value of a time-varying local public good: air quality. It uses the General Social Survey (GSS), which asks thousands of people in various U.S. locations how happy they are, along with other demographic and attitude questions. These data are matched with the Environmental Protection Agency's Air Quality System (AQS) to find the level of pollution in those locations on the dates the survey questions were asked. People with higher incomes in any given year and location report higher levels of happiness, and people interviewed on days when air pollution was worse than the local seasonal average report lower levels of happiness. Combining these two concepts, I derive the average marginal rate of substitution between income and air quality - a compensating variation for air pollution.

JEL-codes: H41 Q51 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-pbe and nep-pub
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published as Levinson, Arik, 2012. "Valuing public goods using happiness data: The case of air quality," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(9), pages 869-880.

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Journal Article: Valuing public goods using happiness data: The case of air quality (2012)
Working Paper: Valuing Public Goods Using Happiness Data: The Case of Air Quality (2009)
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