On new homes and green lands : Three microeconometric essays as if urban costs and rural sustainability mattered

Sammanfattning: This thesis is structured as a compendium of three self-contained articles, all single-authored. In the first paper, I analyze the effect of a mortgage cap, a policy implemented as a macroeconomic prudential measure by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority in 2010, on the likelihood of the young adult population purchasing a house in Sweden. I find that the purchasing rate decreases less for the wealth-constrained individuals in relation to the wealth-unconstrained during a four-year period after the implementation of the policy.In the second paper, I examine how experiencing working from home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to out-migration of the working-age population of large Swedish cities. Using register microdata of individuals in the period 2015–2021, the results show that the remote work experiment significantly increased the likelihood of moving out of large cities and of moving to the hinterlands compared to the usual internal migration flows before the pandemic.Finally, I analyze the role of geographical and cognitive proximity in the decision to adopt organic farming in Sweden for the period 2010–2016. I find that the nearby presence of earlier adopters in a parish influences current adoption, indicating the existence of proximity effects in the diffusion of environmentally sustainable technologies across a diversity of farming industries in Sweden. The effect also becomes more pronounced when farmers share cognitive similarities, defined as per type of farming industry, in particular for the dairy sector and mixed farming activities.