The value of school choice opportunities

Lukas Hörnig and Max Schäfer

Labour Economics, 2025, vol. 95, issue C

Abstract: In this paper, we study the house price effects of local school choice opportunities among public primary schools using a rare and large-scale reform that abolished binding catchment areas in North Rhine-Westphalia, the largest German state with 18 million inhabitants. To estimate the reform’s effect on valuations of houses, we compare houses with different local school choice sets, before and after the reform. We find that gaining access to a school within 2,000 meters and with a higher transition rate to the academic track (relative to the initial neighborhood school) increases house prices by 1.5 percent. This effect is larger when the more attractive school is closer and diminishes as distance grows. The full reform effect materializes roughly five years after reform onset.

Keywords: School choice; Housing demand; Real estate markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537125000661
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:95:y:2025:i:c:s0927537125000661

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102742

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().