January 2022

IZA DP No. 15025: Is There a Diminishing Value of Urban Amenities as a Result of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

We investigate whether the COVID-19 pandemic decreased the willingness to pay for urban amenities such as restaurants, cinemas and theaters. We do this by using a hedonic pricing model in combination with a time-gradient difference-in-difference approach. We use a data set that contains virtually all apartments for sale in the larger Stockholm area. We use a very detailed and flexible definition of density of urban amenities based on the exact location of these amenities and the walking distance from the apartments to these amenities. We find a decrease of 1.9 percent of apartments that we label as amenity rich.