Unawareness and selective disclosure: The effect of school quality information on property prices

John Haisken-DeNew, Syed Hasan, Nikhil Jha and Mathias Sinning ()
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: John P. de New

No 667, Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen

Abstract: The Australian Government launched the My School website in 2010 to provide standardised information about the quality of schools to the Australian public. This paper combines data from this website with home sales data for the state of Victoria to estimate the effect of the publication of school quality information on property prices. We use a difference-in-difference approach to estimate the causal effect of the release of information about high-quality and low-quality schools relative to mediumquality schools in the neighborhood and find that the release of information about high-quality schools increases property prices by 3.6 percent, whereas the release of information about low-quality schools has no significant effect. The findings indicate that many buyers are unaware of the relevance of school quality information and that real estate agents pursue a strategy of disclosing information about high-quality schools to increase the sales price. Results from a survey of Victorian real estate agents provide evidence in favor of this strategy.

Keywords: school quality; housing markets; information asymmetry; public policy evaluation; difference-in-difference estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 D84 I24 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/149647/1/87797991X.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Unawareness and selective disclosure: The effect of school quality information on property prices (2018)
Working Paper: Unawareness and Selective Disclosure: The Effect of School Quality Information on Property Prices (2017)
Working Paper: Unawareness and Selective Disclosure: The Effect of School Quality Information on Property Prices (2016)
Working Paper: Unawareness and Selective Disclosure: The Effect of School Quality Information on Property Prices (2016)
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:zbw:rwirep:667

DOI: 10.4419/86788774

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().