A Spatial Difference-in-Differences Estimator to Evaluate the Effect of Change in Public Mass Transit Systems on House Prices

Evaluating the impact of public mass transit systems on real-estate values is an important application of the hedonic price model (HPM). Recently, a mathematical transformation of this approach has been proposed to account for the potential omission of latent spatial variables that may overestimate the impact of accessibility to mass transit systems on values. The development of a Difference-in-Differences (DID) estimator, based on the repeat-sales approach, is a move in the right direction. However, such an estimator neglects the possibility that specification of the price equation may follow a spatial autoregressive process with respect to the dependent variable. The objective of this pap…