Valuing School Quality Using Boundary Discontinuities

Stephen Gibbons, Stephen Machin and Olmo Silva

CEE Discussion Papers from Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE

Abstract: Existing research shows that house prices respond to local school quality as measured by average test scores. However, higher test scores could signal better quality teaching and academic value-added, or higher ability, sought-after intakes. In our research, we show decisively that value-added drives households' demand for good schooling. However, prior achievement - linked to the background of children in school - also matters. In order to identify these effects, we improve the boundary discontinuity regression methodology by matching identical properties across admissions authority boundaries; by allowing for boundary effects and spatial trends; by re-weighting our data towards transactions that are closest to district boundaries; by eliminating boundaries that coincide with major geographical features; and by submitting our estimates to a number of novel falsification tests. Our results survive this battery of experiments and show that a one-standard deviation change in either school average value-added or prior achievement raises prices by around 3%.

Keywords: House prices; school quality; boundary discontinuities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 H75 I20 R21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cee/ceedp132.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Valuing school quality using boundary discontinuities (2013)
Working Paper: Valuing school quality using boundary discontinuities (2012)
Working Paper: Valuing School Quality Using Boundary Discontinuities (2009)
Working Paper: Valuing school quality using boundary discontinuities (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:ceedps:0132

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