The Impact of Swedish Public Finance Factors on the Local Real Estate Market : Based on the GMM PVAR Approach

Abstract: Real estate market prices have proven to be influenced by many driving factors. As suggested by Tiebout's (1956) model, the level of public services was believed to influence people's decision to move geographically, which was called "voting with their feet". The panel data used in this paper were the market price of one- or two- dwelling buildings and the per capita cost of public investment factors in 290 municipalities in Sweden for the period 2011 to 2020. The principal component analysis method was firstly performed to dimensionalize the data and create new index variables. A panel vector autoregressive model based on the GMM estimator was developed, and cluster robust standard errors were used to address autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity. The empirical results showed that in addition to demographic variables, the principal components of government investment variables in traffic infrastructure, youth education and comprehensive health care, had a positive stimulating effect on real estate prices. The results of Granger causality tests showed a positive effect of the increment in house prices on investment in public activities. The IRF plots and variance decomposition of the first-order difference in real estate prices over the next ten periods showed that despite the presence of positive stimulus for public investment, house prices were more independent in the future, which indicated the dominant factor in the movements was itself.