Measuring Housing Quality Using Revealed Preference: A Geographic PageRank Approach

This paper introduces Geographic PageRank (GPR), an innovative measure of place quality that is based on migration decisions, employing a recursive algorithm that leverages the full network of migration flows. Using various public data sources, we construct GPR rankings for U.S. counties and metropolitan areas. We also extend the rankings to capture changes over time and differences for population subgroups, providing a versatile data product. As an application, we show that GPR can serve as an "anti-instrument'' for unobserved housing quality when pricing environmental amenities, recovering a correctly signed implicit price of air pollution that is in line with quasi-experimental benchmarks. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.