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cial. Although the national government relies on cadastral data from the Agustin Codazzi Geographic Institute, three regions composed of two departments (among them, Antioquia, where Medellín is located) and Bogotá have assumed responsibility for their own data. There remains room for improvement in this area, however—possibly more so in the case of Antioquia. The Codazzi Institute previously has provided assistance to these cities’ efforts, and it can continue to do so to make cadastral data available for further analysis.

4. Easily collected data on life satisfaction could be substituted for typically scarce cadastral data for several purposes. Nonetheless, LS questions must be kept comparable across surveys.

5. Because census data can be used to build detailed indicators of QoL and other topics, local authorities should continue to make admin- istrative records available to analysts. The ultimate beneficiaries of analysts’ findings are those authorities themselves, along with the public. Multilateral organizations likewise may find ways to make available to researchers and analysts the data from multiple sources, including well-known sources such as Gallup polls, the Living Standards Measurement Survey, and employment surveys. Making data widely available over time can prevent policy making and program evaluation from depending on the capacity and spe- cific interests of institutions that currently provide or have exclusive access to information.

Notes

1. Estimates are based on Colombia’s 2005 population census.

2. The survey was conducted between June 6 and July 23. Household mem- bers 18 years and older were directly interviewed.

3. Bogotá is divided into 20 localidades—19 urban and 1 rural.

4. Urban areas are split into six socioeconomic strata, the first of which has the lowest QoL levels. Households in different socioeconomic strata are usually very different, although Medina and Morales (2007) show that, in most of the cases in Bogotá, houses on both sides of a boundary between two socioeconomic strata become more similar the closer they are to their common boundary.

quality of life in bogotá and medellín 157

5. The socioeconomic stratification is a spatial system used in Colombia to target subsidies to domiciliary public utility services. To determine the socioeco- nomic stratum to which a house belongs, an agency of the central government designs a methodology that is applied by each municipality. The methodology considers both information about the house (constructed square meters, number of rooms, number of bathrooms, material of floors and walls, and the like) and about its neighborhood (quality of streets, public parks, access to transportation, and so forth) to estimate a score. These socioeconomic strata are ranked from 1 (most deprived conditions) to 6 (least deprived conditions).

6. For Bogotá, house values also are available from the survey of households owning houses in which they live. Rent prices are available for households living as tenants (question: how much do you pay?) and for those living in their own houses (question: how much would you pay if your house was rented?).

7. For more details on hedonic regressions, see Rosen (1974).

8. For an analysis that compares the two cities, see Medina, Morales, and Núñez (2008).

9. Clearly, this coefficient should be negative, and the coefficient of piped gas coverage should be positive rather than negative. These results suggest they might be capturing the presence of unobserved characteristics not accounted for in the regression.

10. Some exploratory exercises (not reported) show that there are nonlineari- ties in the relationship between distance to school and house value that imply that prices initially increase and then decrease with distance to schools. The finding suggests that households like to have schools in proximity, but not too close to bear such costs as those arising from traffic congestion.

11. Mendieta and Perdomo (2007) also find a positive effect of being closer to a TransMilenio station, although one of much higher magnitude.

12. Echeverry et al. (2005) point to the lack of integration of the traditional and TransMilenio transit systems as one of the most important factors of quantifying negative spillovers of TransMilenio.

13. Because the shares of households in all socioeconomic strata must always add up to 1.00, think of having a marginal change of 0.43 times a very small frac- tion of a 1.00 SD of the house price caused by a change of the same very small fraction of a 1.00 SD in the share of households in stratum 4, compensated with a reduction of the same magnitude in the share of households in stratum 1, and maintaining equal the shares of households in the other strata.

14. An opulent house would rarely be classified as poor, nor would a modest house located in a prosperous neighborhood.

15. The negative relationship with the area of land, given that the area of construction is already controlled for, might be signaling that houses are located in poorer areas within socioeconomic strata.

16. For rents (results not reported), the most important variable is the number of rooms, followed by the socioeconomic stratum, the average education of the census sector, and whether the household has gas available for cooking.

17. Medellín’s bus rapid-transit system is called Metro-Plus. Although it was under construction at the time of the survey, households knew where its stations would be located.

18. For a survey on this topic, see Frey and Stutzer (2002) or van Praag (2007). The terms life satisfaction and happiness are used interchangeably here because previous work by Blanchflower and Oswald (2004) and Di Tella, MacCulloch, and Oswald (2001) has found the terms’ implications to be similar.

19. Note that the question used is different from the one traditionally included in the European Social Survey (namely, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays? Please answer using this card, where

0 means extremely dissatisfied and 10 means extremely satisfied.”) or in the German Socio-Economic Panel (“In conclusion, we would like to ask you about your sat- isfaction with your life in general, please answer according to the following scale: 0 means completely dissatisfied and 10 means completely satisfied: How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?”).

20. You will find similar applications in Di Tella and MacCulloch (2007) and Ferrer-i-Carbonell and van Praag (2002).

21. Old and new SISBEN (System for the Selection of Beneficiaries of Social Pro- grams) are proxy means tests used to target social public expenditure in Colombia. 22. For example, see Frey and Stutzer (2002), Layard (2003), and the refer- ences therein.

23. A deeper analysis of the role of children can be found in Medina, Morales, and Núñez (2008).

24. To estimate indexes by census sector, we identify the location of the 200 neighbors closest to the centroid of each census sector (either located in that spe- cific census sector or located elsewhere); and, on that basis, we define a bandwidth for each census sector with which we construct biweight kernels. We found similar results when using the nearest 400 neighbors.

25. This figure is 12 times the amount of an annual perpetuity at the 10 percent discount rate. A discount rate of 15 percent would imply a present value of $1,700, very similar to the one for Bogotá.

26. It is a bit surprising that the negative average obtained for the indexes based on LS models is more negative in Medellín than in Bogotá. According to our approach, it would imply that individuals are pricing negative characteristics in a magnitude they cannot afford to fully compensate with their reported incomes. This fact suggests a gap between the way household heads consider what charac- teristics should be worth and what they are actually willing to pay to get them.

27. These are the programs known as Bogotá Cómo Vamos and Medellín Cómo Vamos. They are part of a wider cities-monitoring network called Red de Ciudades.

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