Abstract
Past studies on the designation of historic districts for preservation purposes have shown mixed results, possibly due to the variability of restrictiveness in the regulations and the degree of financial support as well as the varieties of specifications in the hedonic pricing model, possibly with an endogeneity problem. Using property data with geographic information in a historic district with two different preservation policies in place, we provide insights into the two mentioned points. We observed a negative impact of restrictive historic district designations on rental prices after extracting the external effect of the designation, but no significant impacts in the district with less restrictive regulation. Estimation results using the samples located around the boundaries of designated areas do not alter this tendency, although the magnitude is sensitive to the size of bandwidth from the boundaries.
