Effects on housing prices of urban attraction and labor-market accessibility

Through a hedonic approach the authors focus primarily on how house prices vary systematically with respect to some general spatial structure characteristics in a Norwegian region. The introduction of a gravity-based labor-market accessibility measure contributes significantly to explain variation in housing prices, and is used in a model formulation where the distance from the city center is accounted for. Based on these results we suggest a distinction between an urban-attraction effect and a labor-market accessibility effect. Quantitatively, the two distinct effects are found to contribute about equally to intraregional variation in housing prices.