Röstar skåningar med fötterna? Om kommunal skatt och välfärds påverkan på bostadspriserna

Sammanfattning: This paper examines if individuals take local income taxes and public spending into account when choosing where to live. A hedonic price model is applied to a dataset containing 5545 sales in southern Skåne to used to analyze the effects of local tax and spending differences on the prices of privately-owned housing. The different effects for apartments and houses as well as the effect of municipal finance equalization are analyzed as well. The results vary based on how municipalities are grouped. In the area most consistent with the assumptions of the Tiebout hypothesis, local tax rates and public spending are found to significantly affect housing prices, suggesting that individuals indeed vote with their feet. This result is consistent with the results from other studies. The varying results in different groups of municipalities suggest that there might be methodological problems associated with the geographical selection or that the data set is too small. The results raise several questions that should be addressed in future research.