EXTERNALIDADES AMBIENTAIS E PREZO DA VIVENDA EN MADRID: UNHA ANáLISE CON REGRESIóN CUANTíLICA ESPACIAL

Air pollution and urban noise are major concerns in big cities. This paper aims at evaluating how they impact transaction prices in downtown Madrid. For that purpose, we incor-porate two subjective measures of air pollution and noise, joint with other variables available for individual characteristics, accessibility and socio-economic data, and we use spatial quantile models with a sample of 5,080 houses in downtown Madrid. Spatial quantile regressions are a good instrument to deal with common problems in hedonic models, such as non-linearity, non- -normality due to asymmetries and outliers, heteroskedasticity and spatial autocorrelation. We find that noise and air-pollution have no clear significant effect except in the wealthier neighbor-hoods, where pollution is clearly a disamenity. Additionally, we find a counter-intuitive positive sign for the effect of noise only for the group of the most exclusive properties, possibly because of their owner high sense of place , joint to the existence of some other related positive associ-ated externalities, such as upscale shops and historical or cultural areas.