Environmental Amenities as a Source of Market Power

Site-specific environmental amenities can provide a source of product-differentiating market power. Using estimates from hedonic-price equations and residual-demand models, our analysis recovers firm-specific estimates of price markups as measures of market power, and uses these markups to estimate the implied marginal value for access to coastal beaches. The application involves rental price and occupancy data for several thousand beach properties along a portion of the North Carolina coastline during the 1987 to 1992 rental seasons.