IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cesifo/v64y2018i2p150-175..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Best Education Money Can Buy? Capitalization of School Quality in Finland

Author

Listed:
  • Oskari Harjunen
  • Mika Kortelainen
  • Tuukka Saarimaa

Abstract

By international comparison, Finnish pupil achievement is high and school achievement differences small. The Finnish education system is unusual also because there are no national testing programmes, and information on school quality measures is not publicly disclosed. Is school quality capitalized into house prices in this environment? Using a boundary discontinuity research design and data from Helsinki, we find that it is: 1 standard deviation increase in average test scores increases prices on average by 3%, which is comparable to findings from the UK and the USA. We argue that this surprisingly large effect is at least partly explained by the inelasticity of housing supply, as we use data from a densely populated urban area. We also show that the effect depends on local land supply conditions within the city and is highest in areas with inelastic supply. Furthermore, the price premium seems to be related to pupils’ socio-economic background rather than school effectiveness.

Suggested Citation

  • Oskari Harjunen & Mika Kortelainen & Tuukka Saarimaa, 2018. "Best Education Money Can Buy? Capitalization of School Quality in Finland," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo Group, vol. 64(2), pages 150-175.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cesifo:v:64:y:2018:i:2:p:150-175.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cesifo/ifx025
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Schwartz, Amy Ellen & Voicu, Ioan & Horn, Keren Mertens, 2014. "Do choice schools break the link between public schools and property values? Evidence from house prices in New York City," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 1-10.
    2. Stephen Machin & Kjell G. Salvanes, 2016. "Valuing School Quality via a School Choice Reform," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 118(1), pages 3-24, January.
    3. Erik Hanushek & Stephen Machin & Ludger Woessmann (ed.), 2011. "Handbook of the Economics of Education," Handbook of the Economics of Education, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 4, number 4, June.
    4. Sandra E. Black, 1999. "Do Better Schools Matter? Parental Valuation of Elementary Education," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(2), pages 577-599.
    5. David Brasington & Donald R. Haurin, 2006. "Educational Outcomes and House Values: A Test of the value added Approach," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 46(2), pages 245-268, May.
    6. A. Colin Cameron & Jonah B. Gelbach & Douglas L. Miller, 2008. "Bootstrap-Based Improvements for Inference with Clustered Errors," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 90(3), pages 414-427, August.
    7. David S. Lee & Thomas Lemieux, 2010. "Regression Discontinuity Designs in Economics," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 48(2), pages 281-355, June.
    8. Gilles Duranton & Laurent Gobillon & Henry G. Overman, 2011. "Assessing the Effects of Local Taxation using Microgeographic Data," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 121(555), pages 1017-1046, September.
    9. Patrick Bayer & Fernando Ferreira & Robert McMillan, 2007. "A Unified Framework for Measuring Preferences for Schools and Neighborhoods," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 115(4), pages 588-638, August.
    10. Fack, Gabrielle & Grenet, Julien, 2010. "When do better schools raise housing prices? Evidence from Paris public and private schools," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(1-2), pages 59-77, February.
    11. Downes, Thomas A. & Zabel, Jeffrey E., 2002. "The impact of school characteristics on house prices: Chicago 1987-1991," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(1), pages 1-25, July.
    12. Ian Davidoff & Andrew Leigh, 2008. "How Much do Public Schools Really Cost? Estimating the Relationship between House Prices and School Quality," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 84(265), pages 193-206, June.
    13. Gibbons, Stephen & Machin, Stephen & Silva, Olmo, 2013. "Valuing school quality using boundary discontinuities," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 15-28.
    14. Hilber, Christian A.L. & Mayer, Christopher, 2009. "Why do households without children support local public schools? Linking house price capitalization to school spending," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(1), pages 74-90, January.
    15. Christian A. L. Hilber, 2017. "The Economic Implications of House Price Capitalization: A Synthesis," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 45(2), pages 301-339, April.
    16. Atila Abdulkadiroğlu & Joshua Angrist & Parag Pathak, 2014. "The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 82(1), pages 137-196, January.
    17. Rothstein, Jesse M, 2006. "Good Principals or Good Peers? Parental Valuation of School Characteristics, Tiebout Equilibrium, and the Incentive Effects of Competition among Jurisdictions," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt9kz4s6v9, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    18. Brasington, David M. & Haurin, Donald R., 2009. "Parents, peers, or school inputs: Which components of school outcomes are capitalized into house value?," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 39(5), pages 523-529, September.
    19. Clapp, John M. & Nanda, Anupam & Ross, Stephen L., 2008. "Which school attributes matter? The influence of school district performance and demographic composition on property values," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(2), pages 451-466, March.
    20. repec:mab:wpaper:23 is not listed on IDEAS
    21. Marianne Bertrand & Esther Duflo & Sendhil Mullainathan, 2004. "How Much Should We Trust Differences-In-Differences Estimates?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 119(1), pages 249-275.
    22. Jesse M. Rothstein, 2006. "Good Principals or Good Peers? Parental Valuation of School Characteristics, Tiebout Equilibrium, and the Incentive Effects of Competition among Jurisdictions," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(4), pages 1333-1350, September.
    23. Oikarinen, Elias & Peltola, Risto & Valtonen, Eero, 2015. "Regional variation in the elasticity of supply of housing, and its determinants: The case of a small sparsely populated country," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 18-30.
    24. Eerola, Essi & Saarimaa, Tuukka, 2018. "Delivering affordable housing and neighborhood quality: A comparison of place- and tenant-based programs," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 44-54.
    25. Brunner, Eric J. & Cho, Sung-Woo & Reback, Randall, 2012. "Mobility, housing markets, and schools: Estimating the effects of inter-district choice programs," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(7), pages 604-614.
    26. Andrea Baranzini & José Ramirez & Caroline Schaerer & Philippe Thalmann (ed.), 2008. "Hedonic Methods in Housing Markets," Springer Books, Springer, number 978-0-387-76815-1, December.
    27. Christian A. L. Hilber & Christopher J. Mayer, 2004. "Why Do Households Without Children Support Local Public Schools?," NBER Working Papers 10804, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    28. Iftikhar Hussain, 2015. "Subjective Performance Evaluation in the Public Sector: Evidence from School Inspections," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 50(1), pages 189-221.
    29. Erik Hanushek & Stephen Machin & Ludger Woessmann (ed.), 2011. "Handbook of the Economics of Education," Handbook of the Economics of Education, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 3, number 3, June.
    30. Raj Chetty & Nathaniel Hendren & Lawrence F. Katz, 2016. "The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(4), pages 855-902, April.
    31. Iftikhar Hussain, 2012. "Subjective Performance Evaluation in the Public Sector: Evidence from School Inspections," CEE Discussion Papers 0135, Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE.
    32. Nguyen-Hoang, Phuong & Yinger, John, 2011. "The capitalization of school quality into house values: A review," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(1), pages 30-48, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Huang, Bin & He, Xiaoyan & Xu, Lei & Zhu, Yu, 2020. "Elite school designation and housing prices-quasi-experimental evidence from Beijing, China✰," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(C).
    2. Federico Belotti & Edoardo Di Porto & Gianluca Santoni, 2018. "Spatial Differencing: Estimation and Inference," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo Group, vol. 64(2), pages 241-254.
    3. Ismail, Mohammad & Warsame, Abukar & Wilhelmsson, Mats, 2022. "Schools' capitalization into housing values in a context of free school choices," Working Paper Series 22/4, Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Real Estate and Construction Management & Banking and Finance.
    4. Huang, Bin & He, Xiaoyan & Xu, Lei & Zhu, Yu, 2020. "Elite School Designation and Housing Prices: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Beijing, China," IZA Discussion Papers 12897, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Andersson, Henrik & Blind, Ina & Brunåker, Fabian & Dahlberg, Matz & Fredriksson, Greta & Granath, Jakob & Liang, Che-Yuan, 2023. "What's in a Label? On Neighbourhood Labelling, Stigma and Housing Prices," SocArXiv xu759, Center for Open Science.
    6. Venla Bernelius & Katja Vilkama, 2019. "Pupils on the move: School catchment area segregation and residential mobility of urban families," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(15), pages 3095-3116, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Imberman, Scott A. & Lovenheim, Michael F., 2016. "Does the market value value-added? Evidence from housing prices after a public release of school and teacher value-added," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 104-121.
    2. Chung, Il Hwan, 2015. "School choice, housing prices, and residential sorting: Empirical evidence from inter-and intra-district choice," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 39-49.
    3. Christian A. L. Hilber, 2017. "The Economic Implications of House Price Capitalization: A Synthesis," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 45(2), pages 301-339, April.
    4. Xiao Tian & Jin Liu & Yong Liu, 2022. "How Does the Quality of Junior High Schools Affect Housing Prices? A Quasi-Natural Experiment Based on the Admission Reform in Chengdu, China," Land, MDPI, vol. 11(9), pages 1-18, September.
    5. Eli Beracha & William G. Hardin, 2021. "The housing price premium associated with charter schools," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 49(4), pages 1267-1289, December.
    6. Melser, Daniel & Moallemi, Morteza & Kim, Jun Sung, 2021. "Preferences for single-sex schools: Evidence from the housing market," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 189(C), pages 710-726.
    7. Nguyen-Hoang, Phuong & Yinger, John, 2011. "The capitalization of school quality into house values: A review," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(1), pages 30-48, March.
    8. Agarwal, Sumit & Rengarajan, Satyanarain & Sing, Tien Foo & Yang, Yang, 2016. "School allocation rules and housing prices: A quasi-experiment with school relocation events in Singapore," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 42-56.
    9. Alexander W. Marré & Anil Rupasingha, 2020. "School quality and rural in‐migration: Can better rural schools attract new residents?," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 60(1), pages 156-173, January.
    10. W. Bentley MacLeod & Miguel Urquiola, 2018. "Is Education Consumption or Investment? Implications for the Effect of School Competition," NBER Working Papers 25117, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Yi Huang & Sandy Dall’erba, 2021. "Does Proximity to School Still Matter Once Access to Your Preferred School Zone Has Already Been Secured?," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 62(4), pages 548-577, May.
    12. Gibbons, Stephen & Machin, Stephen & Silva, Olmo, 2013. "Valuing school quality using boundary discontinuities," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 15-28.
    13. Xuejuan Su & Huayi Yu, 2022. "Valuing elementary schools: evidence from public school acquisitions in Beijing," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 124(4), pages 1117-1141, October.
    14. Kang Mo Koo & Jerry Liang, 2021. "The Effect of Bilingual Education on Housing Price-a Case Study of Bilingual School Conversion," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 62(4), pages 629-664, May.
    15. Geoffrey K. Turnbull & Minrong Zheng, 2021. "A Meta‐Analysis of School Quality Capitalization in U.S. House Prices," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 49(4), pages 1120-1171, December.
    16. Chan, Jimmy & Fang, Xian & Wang, Zhi & Zai, Xianhua & Zhang, Qinghua, 2020. "Valuing primary schools in urban China," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).
    17. Fack, Gabrielle & Grenet, Julien, 2010. "When do better schools raise housing prices? Evidence from Paris public and private schools," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(1-2), pages 59-77, February.
    18. Mothorpe, Christopher, 2018. "The impact of uncertainty on school quality capitalization using the border method," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 127-141.
    19. Sylvia Y He, 2017. "A hierarchical estimation of school quality capitalisation in house prices in Orange County, California," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 54(14), pages 3337-3359, November.
    20. Hussain, Iftikhar, 2023. "Housing market and school choice response to school quality information shocks✰," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    boundary discontinuity; house prices; school quality; spatial differencing;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C21 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models
    • H75 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Government: Health, Education, and Welfare
    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • R21 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Housing Demand

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cesifo:v:64:y:2018:i:2:p:150-175.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.