The varying impact of land subsidence and earth fissures on residential property values in Maricopa County – a quantile regression approach

This paper uses quantile regression to examine the impact of land subsidence and earth fissures on residential property values across different quantiles of distribution in housing prices in Maricopa County, Arizona. Using 82,716 arms-length property sales between 2004 and 2010, we estimated a fixed effects quantile regression model predicting the impact of land subsidence and earth fissures on property values. We found that both land subsidence and earth fissures had a negative impact on property values. The impact of land subsidence and earth fissures vary statistically across different distributions of housing prices. Disamenity impacts are found to be more pronounced at high-priced homes while they are statistically insignificant at substantially lower priced homes.