The Effects of Primary School Access on Housing Prices: Evidence from the Public-Private School Enrollment Reform in Guangzhou, China

Sixian Shu and Midori Wakabayashi

No 85, TUPD Discussion Papers from Graduate School of Economics and Management, Tohoku University

Abstract: This paper examines how changes in school admission rules affect housing market capitalization across urban neighborhoods in a deterministic public school assignment system. We study the 2020 Synchronous Enrollment Policy (SEP) in Guangzhou, China, which synchronized public and private school admissions and replaced selective private admissions with lottery allocation, thereby increasing uncertainty in private school enrollment while leaving public school catchments unchanged. Using transaction-level data on second-hand housing sales from 2018 to 2021 matched with official public primary school catchment maps, we implement a difference-in-differences strategy comparing price changes across neighborhoods inside and outside high-quality public school districts before and after the reform. We find that the policy increased the housing price premium associated with high- quality public school zones by approximately 4.2 percent. The capitalization effect exhibits systematic spatial heterogeneity: it is stronger in urban core districts, attenuates with residential distance to assigned schools, and is amplified in areas with greater exposure to elite private schools. These findings suggest that the housing market consequences of admission reforms depend critically on pre-existing educational competition structures and intra-urban spatial structure.

Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2026-05
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