Willing to pay more for high-quality schools?

A hedonic pricing and propensity score matching approach

Abstract

Principally, the enrolment of elementary school in China is solely based on residential location. Due to the scarcity of prestigious schools, the household registration (or hukou in Chinese) and the territorial-based school admission policy, a feasible approach for parents to provide the children with good education is to purchase the house in the attendance zone of a high-quality school (or xuequfang in Chinese). The supply-demand imbalance gives rise to the xuequfang phenomenon (much higher prices of xuequfang relative to non xuequfang). Based on 1250 housing samples in 286 multi- or high-storey residential districts, this paper firstly develops two basic and four Box-Cox transformed hedonic price models to estimate the effect of high-quality schools on residential property prices. The consistency of six models greatly enhances the credibility of this study. Moreover, complementary, the propensity score matching technique is used to estimate the treatment effect. The two methods consistently suggest that residential property values are affected by top-tier schools. They reveal that xuequfang exhibit values that are between 9.3% and 12.1% higher than non-xuequfang, ceteris paribus. The negative influences of the xuequfang phenomenon and several countermeasures (gradually reforming household registration system, optimizing resource distribution to balance the quality of education, highlighting family education and children’s all-round development) are discussed.