Impacts of High Speed Rail on Residential Property Prices in Italy

The role played by High-Speed Rail (HSR) systems in terms of encour-aging travel, tourism and boosting the labor productivity of the cities and regions served has been widely studied. Since 2008 Italy has experienced the launch of HSR in the country. Despite the great innovation in Italy, impacts of HSR on property prices remain unexplored. The added value of this contribution is to analyse the link between HSR and residential property prices for the case study of Italy. The research aims at analyzing the processes of transformation of the territory and the correla-tion between HSR and the real estate market, quantifying the impacts that HSR has generated. The methodology is based on the evaluation of impact assessment through a hedonic pricing model, by estimating ex post and ex ante scenarios of residential properties values close to HSR stations with a difference-in-difference approach. To demonstrate the robustness of the method the OLS estimators is applied. This study is based on a dataset of 10 cities served by HSR, considering also dummies variables to simulate the HSR cause-effect. A preliminary analysis shows a link between HSR and residential property prices.