Assessing the impact of public amenities on house prices in the Greek islands

This paper examines the impact of local public amenities on house prices in the islands of Greece. By taking the Greek islands as the case study, which has not been studied in detail on this topic, we analyse how the presence of a public hospital, an airport, a higher educational institution along with other public amenities affect the housing market (primary and second houses). The housing market attributes of the Greek islands that greatly characterise the market affect the housing needs and consumption behaviour, determinants of the demand and supply, the significance of hospital care for the residents, and the need for fast transportation. With the use of hedonic modelling approach and a large dataset of residential properties in the islands of Greece, we try to ascertain the effects of these amenities on the house prices. The model also controls for several structural and locational characteristics of the properties as well as economic and demographic attributes of the islands. The econometric estimation attempts to address common sources of bias with such modelling framework i.e. unobserved heterogeneity, omitted variable bias, non-linear effects. Models are also tested for robustness across several specifications and samples.