Housing prices - Impacts of exposure to road traffic and location

Two datasets are used to asses the impact of road traffic noise and other variables on market price of housing properties. A hedonic price approach is used and hedonic prices are estimated by standard regression technique. The coefficients for noise are estimated with high T-values and the magnitude is consistent with international experience. The results indicates that prices decrease by 0.5 per cent per dBA increase in estimated noise for owner-occupied housing. For appartments in the housing co-operative the estimated impact is only half this value. An explanation for this discrepancy may be that the noise coefficient also captures the impacts other disamenities caused by road traffic and that these - on the average - are less severe for appartments belonging to the housing co-operative.