Settling for Quality? : Estimating relative quality of life for Swedish counties using cross-migration data

Sammanfattning: The main purpose on this thesis is to analyze utility differences between Swedish counties and to determine the relative quality of life (QoL) for these regions. This is achieved by using migration data to estimate the counties attractiveness in line with Tiebout’s (1957) idea that individuals reveales their preferences for a region by choosing where to settle. The methods used are mainly based on the work by Wall’s (2001) and Nakajima and Tabuchi (2011). I estimate a pooled OLS based on cross-county migration data for the period 2000 to 2016, which reveals that most of the Swedish counties have a relative QoL that does not differ from the average QoL for Sweden. However, some counties, mainly northern ones, seem to perform worse than the average. Additionally, I estimate the relative utility differentials for the Swedish counties and find that they have stayed relatively constant in relation to each other during the time period.