Adam Tyrcha (p), Maria Abreu

Gunther Maier

International migration flows into Sweden have been significant over the past few decades, but the nature of flows has changed over the years, with arrivals including waves of refugee flows from Chile, the Balkan countries, and Asia, as well as labour migration from Northern and Central Europe. This paper examines the impact of different forms of international and internal migration on housing markets in Sweden, looking primarily at impacts on house prices. The data covers the period 2000-2015, and 284 municipalities. Our analysis considers regional differences in the impact of migration flows on house prices, and disentangles the impact arising from different types of migration, including internal migration within Sweden. Our findings suggest migration is generally positively associated with house price increases, but the results reveal stark regional differences in impacts on housing in different parts of the country. House prices in major cities appear to benefit most from international migration with internal migration having little impact, while in smaller urban areas we see greater house price increases from internal migration, with international migration having little effect. Further, migrants with different reasons for migration also have dissimilar impacts on different housing market segments, with refugee migrants having a larger impact than expected in some cases.

Daniel Felsenstein (p), Michael Beenstock , Dan Feldman

Gunther Maier

A new empirical approach to identify local housing markets (LHM's) is proposed, which focuses on the spatial correlation between local house price indices constructed from repeat sales data. It extends the work of Pryce (2013) who claimed that if housing in different locations are perfect substitutes, their house price indices should be perfectly correlated over time. Repeat sales data for house prices in Tel Aviv during 1998 – 2014 are used to construct house price indices for almost 100 census tracts. These price indices are used to define LHMs, the number of which varies inversely with the pairwise correlation cut-off, and with the degree of spatial contiguity. Results point to considerable spatial heterogeneity in house price movement. This belies the popular impression that the Tel Aviv housing market is relatively homogeneous, characterized by expensive housing and uniform house price movements.