Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Does Atlanta Value Marta? Selecting An Autoregressive Model To Recover Willingness To Pay, Juan Moreno-Cruz, Gregory Macfarland, Laurie Garrow

Juan B. Moreno-Cruz

Understanding homeowners’ marginal willingness-to-pay (MWTP) for proximity to public transportation infrastructure is important for planning and policy. Naïve estimates of MWTP, however, may be biased as a result of spatial dependence, spatial correlation, and/or spatially endogenous variables. In this paper we discuss a class of spatial autoregressive models that control for these spatial effects, and apply them to sample data collected for the Atlanta, Georgia housing market. We provide evidence that a general-to-specific model selection methodology that relies on the generality of the spatial Durbin model (SDM) should be preferred to the classical specific-to-general methodology that begins with an assumption …