Quantifying the Economic Value of Indoor Environmental Quality: Econometric and Data-Driven Approaches

Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) has become a key dimension of building performance, encompassing indoor air quality, thermal, acoustic, and visual comfort, ventilation, and other conditions affecting occupants’ well-being and use of indoor spaces. While these attributes are increasingly monitored and assessed from technical, environmental, and health perspectives, their economic implications remain comparatively less explored. In particular, there is a need for robust quantitative approaches capable of identifying how improvements in indoor environmental performance are translated into measurable economic benefits, including property value premiums, rental differentials, users’ willingness to pay, and returns from building retrofit investments. Advances in econometric methods, high-frequency building monitoring, sensor-based data, and machine-learning techniques now provide new opportunities to quantify these relationships and to integrate indoor environmental performance into real estate valuation and investment decision-making.The goal of this Research Topic is to advance the economic assessment of Indoor Environmental Quality by developing and applying robust econometric and data-driven approaches capable of quantifying its contribution to real estate and building-related value. A key challenge is to isolate the marginal economic effects of individual IEQ attributes while accounting for building characteristics, location, market conditions, and occupants’ preferences. The Research Topic therefore aims to bridge indoor environmental performance assessment and economic valuation by promoting empirical models that integrate technical, environmental, behavioral, and market data. Particular attention is given to recent advances in spatial econometrics, panel and multilevel models, causal inference, machine learning, and hybrid valuation methods, as well as to the increasing availability of sensor-based and building-monitoring data. The ultimate objective is to provide stronger evidence on how IEQ improvements affect property prices, rents, willingness to pay, investment returns, and the economic feasibility of building retrofit strategies.This Research Topic welcomes theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions investigating the economic value associated with Indoor Environmental Quality and its individual components. Relevant themes include:- the capitalization of indoor air quality, thermal, acoustic, and visual comfort in property prices and rents; - users’ willingness to pay for improved indoor environmental conditions; - the economic assessment of IEQ-oriented retrofit interventions; - the integration of sensor-based, building-monitoring, and real estate market data into valuation models. Contributions applying econometric, spatial, panel-data, causal, machine-learning, and hybrid approaches are particularly encouraged, especially when they provide robust estimates of the marginal economic effects of IEQ attributes. Comparative studies across building types, geographic contexts, and market segments are also welcome. The Topic invites Original Research, Methods, Review, and Perspective articles that establish a clear and substantial link between indoor environmental performance and economic valuation. Topic editors: Francesco Paolo Del Giudice, Benedetto Manganelli, Pierfrancesco De Paola Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86227/quantifying-the-economic-value-of-indoor-environmental-quality-econometric-and-data-driven-approaches