How Much Do Public Schools Really Cost? Estimating the Relationship Between House Prices and School Quality

Ian Davidoff and Andrew Leigh

No 558, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research School of Economics, Australian National University

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between housing prices and the quality of public schools in the Australian Capital Territory. To disentangle the effects of schools and other neighbourhood characteristics on the value of residential properties, we compare sale prices of homes on either side of high school attendance boundaries. We find that a 5 percent increase in test scores (approximately one standard deviation) is associated with a 3.5 percent increase in house prices. Our result is in line with private school tuition costs, and accords with prior research from Britain and the United States. Estimating the effect of school quality on house prices provides a possible measure of the extent to which parents value better educational outcomes.

Keywords: housing demand; school quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I22 R21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cbe.anu.edu.au/researchpapers/CEPR/DP558.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How Much do Public Schools Really Cost? Estimating the Relationship between House Prices and School Quality (2008)
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:auu:dpaper:558

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research School of Economics, Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().