Time: 13:00 – 15:00 (GMT+01:00), Wednesday, 21 October 2020 
Presenter: Dr Bo Sjö, Linköping University, Sweden
Chair: Professor Victor Murinde, SOAS University of London
Online venue: Click here to join the CGF Seminar Room on Microsoft Teams

For any inquiry about how to join the online seminar, please contact Dr Meng Xie (xm1@soas.ac.uk) 

Abstract
This study analyses if energy efficiency affects the sales prices of enclosed tenant-owned apartments in Sweden. Energy efficiency is measured by Energy Performance Certificates mandated by EU in 2002. Compared to the previous literature, this study focuses on apartments in tenant-owned associations, rather than single-family houses. In contrast to houses, heating is for the vast majority included in the monthly fee that residents are required to pay the tenant-association, which usually does not change on a short-term basis. Hence, any capitalization of energy efficiency on the price of tenant-owned apartments is not likely to reflect potential cost-savings in the same way as for houses. By hedonic price models and quantile-regressions we capture both the linear and non-linear relationship between the energy performance and grades contained in the EPCs with the sales prices of tenant-owned apartments. These estimations indicate that apartments within tenant-owned buildings with the highest energy efficiency, or highest EPC-grades, are sold with a price premium. This capitalization ranges between 2 to 3.5 percent of the sales price. This detected energy efficiency capitalization is of lesser magnitude compared with recent studies for Sweden that uses data for only single-family houses. The estimated price premiums vary in terms of price distribution of apartments, income levels in the neighborhood as well as between regions. However, controlling for sample selection bias through propensity score matching and coarsened exact matching, our results suggest that this premium might be much both smaller and possibly non-significant. Overall, the effect on prices on tenant owned apartments is somewhat lower than for single family houses. There is room for measures that increases transparency between the energy costs and financing of housing through green bonds.

Presenter
Bo Sjö is an Associate Professor of Financial Economics and Econometrics at the Department of Management and Engineering (IEI), Linköping University, Sweden. He holds a PhD in Economics from Gothenburg University where he also was appointed Docent in 2000. His research interests are focused on finance and macroeconomics; inflation modelling and monetary policy in developing countries, central bank intervention, portfolio selection, remittances, and the pricing of commodities. Before joining Linköping University in 2010, he worked with the Swedish Agency for Development Evaluation (SADEV), Griffith University, and Gothenburg University. He has consulted for African Development Bank (AfDB), Centre for International Development (CID) at Harvard University, Ministry of Planning and Development in Mozambique, African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).  He has been a Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Finance, McGill University, and a Guest Lecturer at the Department of Economics, University of Ghana in cooperation with UNU-WIDER. He has served in the Swedish Research Council’s grant committee for Development Research.