Challenging the idyll: Does crime affect property prices in small towns?

Vania Ceccato () and Mats Wilhelmsson
Additional contact information
Vania Ceccato: Centre for Banking and Finance, Postal: Centre for Banking and Finance, Royal Institute of Technology, Brinellvägen 1, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden

No 13/10, Working Paper Series from Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Real Estate and Construction Management & Banking and Finance

Abstract: This article reports on testing the effect of residential burglary on the housing market in a relatively small Swedish town using data on sales in 2005 and 2011. This assessment is important since the international evidence is dominated by studies based on large urban areas. The study employs different strategies of hedonic price modelling to estimate the impact of crime while controlling for property and neighbourhood characteristics; in particular, it explores the use of quantile regression. Geographic Information System (GIS) is used to combine apartment sales data with residential burglaries, land use characteristics and demographic data. Findings show that residential burglary has a significant negative effect on property prices in 2011 but no impact in 2005. Results also show that the effect of housing characteristics on apartment prices can be explained more in detail by estimating quantile regression models across price categories than using traditional modelling strategies.

Keywords: Residential burglary; apartment prices; hedonic modelling; quantile regression; GIS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R21 R32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2013-08-23
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/a8sdwmcu2b5qtmp/WP201310.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:kthrec:2013_010

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Real Estate and Construction Management & Banking and Finance Department of Real Estate and Construction Management, Royal Institute of Technology, Teknikringen 10B, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cecilia Hermansson ().