EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Does school district and municipality border congruence matter?

Joshua Hall

Urban Studies, 2017, vol. 54, issue 7, 1601-1618

Abstract: Research on zoning typically assumes that city planners aim to maximise housing prices with their land use decisions, either explicitly for public choice reasons or implicitly through the approval of land uses that create local net benefits. Noncongruence of school district and municipality borders severs the link between costs and benefits in the eyes of the median voter, however, which could result in excessive residential development and fiscal externalities that lower property values. This paper uses a hedonic approach to indirectly observe the presence of these externalities. Border congruency between school districts and municipalities in Ohio is measured using GIS data and matched with a data set of 56,717 home sales. The hedonic results indicate that noncongruence is associated with lower housing prices, while the degree of noncongruence is positively related. For most school districts, the negative effect of noncongruency dominates. My results are robust and consistent across different model specifications and empirical approaches.

Keywords: congruence; local government structure; overlapping jurisdictions; polycentrism; spatial econometrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098015619868 (text/html)

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:sae:urbstu:v:54:y:2017:i:7:p:1601-1618

DOI: 10.1177/0042098015619868

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:54:y:2017:i:7:p:1601-1618