Fear Discount? Shootings, Housing Prices, and the Limits of Stigma in Gothenburg

Sammanfattning

Sweden has experienced a significant rise in gang-related shootings over the past decade, raising questions about how such events affect not only public safety but also private wealth through their impact on residential property values. This thesis estimates the causal effect of highly media-covered shootings on housing prices in Gothenburg using transaction-level data on 613 residential property sales from 2023 to 2025, combined with geocoded data on five high-profile shooting events. A difference-in-differences framework compares price developments in properties within one kilometer of a shooting to a control group of unaffected properties elsewhere in Gothenburg, complemented by an event study to assess the parallel trends assumption and to trace dynamic price effects over time. Contrary to the expected hypothesis, no statistically significant negative price effect is found. Instead, treated areas show a positive and marginally significant relative price increase of approximately 5.4 percent compared to the control group in the month following each shooting. The findings are discussed in relation to the potential normalization of gang-related violence among buyers active in affected neighborhoods, and the possibility that treated neighborhoods proved more resilient than the rest of Gothenburg during a period of broader market softening. The results suggest that under certain market conditions, individual shooting events, even highly publicized ones, may not produce measurable housing price discounts, contributing to the limited empirical literature on urban violence and housing markets in Sweden.