Conference Paper
Dust Storms and House Prices
No.
ERF_31_EN55
Publisher
ERF
Date
March, 2025
Topic
Q5. Environmental Economics
This paper provides new empirical evidence on the economic impact of climate change. We investigate the effect of the recent sharp rise in the number of dust storms on the housing market in Iran. We use city-level house price indices as well as a micro-level dataset of almost two million housing transactions in the Iran’s housing market along the data on dust storm exposure from on-the-ground weather stations over recent decades. The regional nature of the increase in the dust storms and their significant variation across Iranian cities allow us to estimate the causal effect of dust exposure on house prices with relative accuracy. We find that the increased frequency of dust storms during the past two decades is associated with sizable and highly uneven declines in property values in many Iranian cities. This research is among the first to investigate the causal relationship between dust storms and house prices. The results have important policy implications at the national and international levels.
Authors
Mohammad Ahmadizadeh
Ph.D. Candidate in Economics, University of Illinois...
Authors
Amirhossein Amini Behbahani
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Howard University
Research Fellows
Hadi Salehi Esfahani
Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Illinois