School Performance, Noncognitive Skills and House Prices

This paper examines parental preference for secondary schools using data from property transactions that occurred between 2015 and 2018 in Scotland, as well as a rich panel of school characteristics. By exploiting discontinuity in attendance across catchment area boundaries, I provide credibly consistent estimates of house price premiums for an array of school characteristics. In particular, whilst I show that house prices do not respond to school value added, school-average performance is well capitalised. I demonstrate that neither of these effects are driven by differences in neighbourhood amenities nor by the presence of private schools. Moreover, I show that in this specific context school “quality” is not multidimensional.