Green Finance in Real Estate, Housing Price Volatility and Rental Swaps

Abstract: This thesis consists of four papers that explore several aspects of the housing market in Sweden: financing of the housing construction sector, price volatility patterns of apartment and house segments and the role of the swap rental market in access to housing and household mobility.The first paper explores the effect of a firm’s reputation of being a green bond issuer on its financing costs. Results show that repeated green bond issuance reduces the real estate firm’s cost of capital and cost of equity and that past green bond issuance is positively related to present green bond issuance.The second paper empirically investigates the differences in idiosyncratic price volatility patterns between apartment and house segments at transaction level, using new spatial-temporal form of garch model. Results show that the segment of apartments shows stronger mean-reversion and auto-correlation, in contrast to houses. Volatility effects increase with wider geographical distances between observations.The third paper investigates the effect of rental swaps on the waiting time of households queuing for permanent tenancy in rental market. Numerical comparative statics from a calibrated search & match model show that active swap market, increases waiting times for less than one year, in average.The final paper in the thesis empirically investigates the household propensity to swap and the effects of the rental swap market on the horizontal and vertical mobility of households. The results show that the swap market increases mobility of locally bounded short-distance movers and helps to make a slight neighbourhood upgrade.