Traditional empirical models of the capitalization
of education quality on house prices have
established that the quality of primary school
education is positively correlated with house
prices. Recent capitalization studies have used
various approaches to address concerns about
omitted variable bias induced by failing to account
for the correlation between school quality and
unobserved neighborhood characteristics. Most
of these variations on the traditional hedonic
approach (including the boundary discontinuity
regression) have assumed that the house price
premium is constant because in all these models
the contribution from school quality on house
prices is constrained to be linear.
In this paper, we propose an alternative formulation
that allows for nonlinear effects of school
quality. We show that this formulation is preferred
by the data over a baseline linear boundary fixed
effects model and that the rate at which the house
price premium rises increases over the range of
school quality. In other words, the standard linear
specification for test scores overestimates the
premium at low levels of school quality and underestimates
the premium at high levels of school
quality.
In the St. Louis metropolitan area, houses
associated with a school ranked at 1 SD below
the mean are essentially priced on physical characteristics
only. In contrast, houses associated
with higher-quality schools command a much
higher price premium.
Interestingly, and in contrast to many studies
in the literature, the price premium remains substantially
large, especially for houses associated
with above-average schools. This is true even in
our most conservative estimates, which complement
the boundary discontinuity approach by
explicitly controlling for neighborhood demographics.
These estimates also reveal that the racial
composition of neighborhoods is capitalized
directly into house prices.