brycewang-stanford/lit-review

Literature Review

Conduct a structured literature search and synthesis for the sewage-house-prices project.

Input: $ARGUMENTS — a topic, paper title, research question, or phenomenon.

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Project-Specific Context

Core Literature Strands

1. Environmental disamenity capitalisation — Hedonic pricing of pollution, noise, flood risk on house prices
2. Water quality and property values — Clean/dirty water effects on housing markets
3. UK water industry — Privatisation, regulation, sewage overflows, EDM monitoring
4. Hedonic pricing methodology — Rosen (1974), Palmquist (1982), repeat sales, spatial approaches
5. Infrastructure and house prices — Transport, utilities, public goods capitalisation
6. Rental market effects — Disamenity capitalisation in rental vs owner-occupied markets
7. Media and information effects — How news coverage affects price discovery

Target Journals (by tier)

Tier 1 (General): AER, Econometrica, QJE, JPE, REStud Tier 2 (Field): JEEM, Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Ecological Economics, Environmental and Resource Economics Tier 3 (Applied/Policy): JEEA, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Economics Letters, Land Economics, Environment and Planning B

Existing Bibliography

• Check docs/overleaf/refs.bib for papers already in the project
• Check docs/lit_review/ for any literature notes

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Workflow

Step 1: Context Gathering

1. Parse the topic from $ARGUMENTS
2. Read docs/overleaf/refs.bib for papers already in the project
3. Check the manuscript sections in docs/overleaf/ for existing literature discussion

Step 2: Search Protocol

Search in this order:

1. Top-5 general interest journals (AER, Econometrica, QJE, JPE, REStud)
2. Field journals (JEEM, JUE, RSUE, JREFE, EE, ERE)
3. NBER/SSRN/IZA working papers
4. Citation chains (forward + backward from key papers found)
5. UK-specific policy sources (Ofwat, Environment Agency, DEFRA)

Use web search to find recent and relevant papers.

Step 3: Assess and Annotate

For each paper found, assign a proximity score (1-5):

• 1 = Directly competes (same question, similar data/method)
• 2 = Closely related (same outcome or same treatment, different context)
• 3 = Methodologically relevant (same identification strategy, different topic)
• 4 = Background context (theoretical foundation, institutional detail)
• 5 = Tangentially related

Step 4: Identify Gaps

Check for:

• Missing seminal papers in hedonic pricing or environmental capitalisation
• Missing recent UK water quality studies
• Missing methodological context for the identification strategies used
• Coverage across journal quality tiers

Step 5: Present Results

# Literature Review: [Topic]
**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD
**Query:** [Original query]

## Summary
[2-3 paragraph overview of the state of the literature]

## Key Papers
### [Author (Year)] — [Short Title]
- **Journal:** [venue]
- **Proximity:** [1-5 score]
- **Contribution:** [1-2 sentences]
- **Identification:** [DiD / IV / RDD / hedonic / descriptive]
- **Key finding:** [result with effect size]
- **Relevance to sewage project:** [specific connection]

## Thematic Organization
### Environmental Disamenity Capitalisation
### Water Quality and Property Values
### Identification Strategy Literature
### UK Water Industry Context

## Gaps and Opportunities
1. [Gap 1 — what's missing and how our paper fills it]
2. [Gap 2]

## Research Frontier
### Active Debates
### Recent Working Papers
### Emerging Methods

## BibTeX Entries
```bibtex
@article{...}

Save to `output/log/lit_review_[topic].md`.

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## Principles

- **Be honest about uncertainty.** If a citation cannot be verified, mark as `% UNVERIFIED`.
- **Prioritize published work** over working papers. Note publication status.
- **Do NOT fabricate citations.** Flag any uncertain details.
- **Identification strategy is key.** Always note how each paper identifies effects.
- **Effect sizes matter.** Report magnitudes, not just signs.
- **Project relevance.** Score proximity specifically to the sewage-house-prices question.