Chapter 37 Quality of life and environmental comparisons

Recent research into the urban quality of life (QOL) is reviewed and analyzed, with a special emphasis on the estimation of implicit prices of environmental attributes. New work has incorporated traditional concerns of urban theory into QOL analyses, as well as increased our understanding of specification bias problems in hedonic estimations. However, empirical research into the QOL finds itself at a crossroads, as the large city-specific error components in the underlying wage and housing expenditure hedonic specifications result in imprecise measurement of overall QOL values and rankings. Amassing higher quality databases to deal with this problem should be high on the agenda of those interested in this research program.