The Influences of High-quality Educational Resources on Housing Prices - Evidences from Beijing’s Fangshan district -

In China, since the 21st century, due to the uneven distribution of educational resources and the growing demand for high quality educational resources, so in the process of school choices, the families who own good family background and high social position could send their children to better schools. Following the “nearby-enrollment policy”, students have to enroll in the public primary and middle schools with the specific attendance areas that where their household registers are located. Given this, this policy encourages parents to prepare earlier and buy school-district housings at a whopping price in the neighborhoods corresponding to their preferred schools. "Sky-high school district house" has become a common phenomenon in China now because of the scarcity of school district houses. This study makes use of the transaction price data of Fangshan’s houses in Beijing and investigates the impacts of distance on housing prices of high-quality education resources using the method of multiple linear regression analysis. The regression result tells that explanatory variables representing distance to key primary school, distance to key secondary school, distance to key high school are the significant factors that affect the school district housing prices, and the shorter the distance is, the higher housing prices are. In robustness test, the variables of interest, including the number of primary schools, middle schools and high schools all exert positive significant effects on housing price, which means that the more schools around the residential areas there are, the higher housing prices are.