Valuing Public Goods Using Happiness Data: The Case of Air Quality / Arik Levinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Levinson, Arik.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w15156.

NBER working paper series no. w15156

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Valuing Public Goods Using Happiness Data

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2009.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2009.