ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how environmental amenities are capitalized into house values at the urban rural fringe. Environmental, neighborhood and infrastructure characteristics are linked to a Geographic Information System database from which distance of given characteristics from the parcel sold have been obtained. To examine the differences in capitalization of environmental amenities, school quality and taxes across the different sub-samples, elasticities for some key variables are estimated for the tax level models. The data used in hedonic analysis were obtained primarily from property transactions kept by the Delaware County Auditor's office, and include 16,935 observations on housing sales that took place between 1988 and 1998. The hedonic functions include variables typical in many similar analyses, such as house size, age, rooms, distance from roads and highways, and others. The lagged tax model considers the possibility that house prices may not increase or decrease concurrently with tax levels, taking more time to adjust.
