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The importance of crime severity for housing prices : Implementation of criminal harm weighting into the literature of crime and housing prices

The empirical results from past research are quite clear. When the surrounding crime level goes up, housing prices go down. However, what has not been acknowledged in the previous literature is that different crimes might impact our willingness-to-pay heterogeneously. As most of the previous research is done through the usage of simple crime rates, this thesis acknowledges the relative severeness of different crimes. Using the newly developed crime harm index (CHI), the relative severity and harm inflicted by a specific crime is identified. The study is conducted in Sweden, Stockholm, using data for the year 2020. With the use of hedonic price equations, spatial models as well as graphical information system software, this thesis estimates a significant, and non-negligible negative relationship between increased area mean CHI and apartment prices. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is one of the very first analyses within the literature, which acknowledges the relative severeness of crimes, and the first to show a significant negative relationship between increased criminal harm and apartment prices. Further, the resulting estimates and method used in this thesis can be utilized to differentiate between the costs of different crimes, hence enabling precise cost estimates. These estimates could for example be of great use to policymaking, urban planners, and decision-making regarding safety investment.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-104560
Date January 2021
CreatorsWrååk, Jonathan
PublisherLinnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för nationalekonomi och statistik (NS)
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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