Assessing discrimination and environmental amenities in the housing market

The Symposium will provide a forum to present and discuss recent advances and applications assessing environmental amenities, land use changes, segregation and discrimination within the housing market, by using the hedonic method.

Participation to the Symposium is on invitation only. If you are interested, please contact Andrea Baranzini or Caroline Schaerer: contact

The Symposium is composed by three events:

• A "Swiss Hedonic Day"” on June 27th. This event will be devoted to the application of the hedonic approach to the Swiss market, cities or Cantons. Swiss researchers from universities, consulting firms and banks will discuss, in an informal way, the models they use, the topics analysed, data and econometric issues and results of the hedonic approach applied to the Swiss housing and property markets.
  
• A "Policy Applications Day" on June 28th. This event will take the form of small presentations highlighting the results of existing Swiss studies and participants will then debate the major policy issues in the noise context. The workshop will be organised around three topics: Swiss policy context and measures; Legal and economic foundation of noise impacts; and Valuing noise impacts.
  
• An "International Day" on June 29th and 30th. This workshop will convene leading international scholars in order to present and discuss innovative solutions and practices in assessing the characteristics of rent determination and economic impact of environmental improvements and land use change. Presenting recent findings on residential segregation and discrimination will allow the discussion to extend on the effect of the identity of the buyers and sellers on the housing market prices. Through a careful review and selection of the topics, papers of high quality will be collected and published in an edited book, which will represent the state-of-the-art of hedonics in the assessment of discrimination and environmental amenities in the housing market.

Program committee

• Andrea BARANZINI
  Geneva School of Business Administration
  
• Bengt KRISTRÖM
  Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå
  
• José RAMIREZ
  Geneva School of Business Administration
  
• Caroline SCHAERER
  Geneva School of Business Administration
  
• Jacques SILBER
  Bar-Ilan University, Israel
  
• Philippe THALMANN
  Federal Institute of Technology, REME, Lausanne