Towards an efficient use of infrastructure and the built environment : Essays in transport and housing economics

Sammanfattning: All four papers in the thesis share a common theme: how to achieve an efficient use of infrastructure and the built environment. In the presence of externalities, pricing according to the (short-run) marginal cost is one answer on how this can be achieved and the first two papers estimates parts of the marginal cost of traffic. Paper I examines the effect of road and railway noise on property prices. It uses the hedonic regression technique on a Swedish data set that contains information about both road and railway noise for each property, and finds that road noise has a larger negative impact on the property prices than railway noise. This is in line with the evidence from the acoustical literature which has shown that individuals are more disturbed by road than railway noise, but contradicts recent results from a hedonic study on data of the United Kingdom.Paper II estimates accident risks and marginal costs for railway level crossings in Sweden. The marginal effect of train traffic on the accident risk is used to derive the marginal cost per train passage that is due to level crossing accidents. The results show that both protection device, road type, traffic volume of the trains, and number of persons living nearby the level crossing have significant influence on the accident probability. The cost per train passage varies substantially depending on type of protection device, road type, the traffic volume of the trains, and number of persons living nearby the crossing.Paper III analyses the attitudes to the Stockholm Congestion Charges in 2007, when the congestion charges had been permanently reintroduced after the trial period in 2006. As expected, low car dependence and good transit supply are associated with high acceptability. But the two most important factors turn out to be beliefs about the charges’ effectiveness, and general environmental attitudes. The importance of beliefs and perceptions of the effects of the charges underscores the importance of both careful system design and careful evaluation and results communication. Paper IV analyses how a property tax reform in Sweden in 2008 that lowered the property tax for especially highly taxed single-family houses and increased the tax on profits from property sales influenced the housing tenure transistion of the elderly. The results show that the probability to exit homeownership for elderly households decreased after the tax reform in 2008. And more importantly, this probability decreased more the larger tax cut the household received. The effect is not only statically significant, it is also of a substantial size.