Car Ownership, Housing Tenure, and Educational Achievement:\-Rural Disparities in Swedish Municipalities

Abstract

How do transportation infrastructure and housing market characteristics relate to educational outcomes? Using administrative data from Sweden's 290 municipalities, we examine the relationship between car ownership rates, housing tenure composition, and educational achievement as measured by Grade 9 merit points. Exploiting substantial cross-municipality variation in car ownership (272–671 cars per 1,000 inhabitants) and housing tenure (rental share ranging from 5% to 56%), we document a strong urban-rural educational gradient. Municipalities with lower car ownership—a proxy for urbanity and public transit accessibility—have significantly higher educational achievement: a 100-car reduction per 1,000 inhabitants is associated with 8.1 higher merit points in bivariate analysis, and 7.7 points (0.61 standard deviations) in the full model with controls. This relationship persists in the full model with housing tenure, teacher qualifications, county fixed effects, and year fixed effects ($R^2 = 0.31$). We find that cooperative housing dominance, characteristic of Swedish urban areas, correlates positively with merit points ($r = 0.40$), while rental-dominant municipalities show lower achievement. Stockholm County leads with 238.4 mean merit points versus 212.9 in Örebro County. These descriptive patterns suggest that urban advantages in educational infrastructure, school density, and residential sorting may drive substantial geographic inequality in Swedish education.