Can Educational Resource Allocation Reduce the Sky-High Price of School District Housing : Evidence from Multi-School Dicing Policy in Beijing, China

China tries to solve the sky-high price of school district housing, which is an inevitable problem in the process of urbanization, through the reform of educational resource allocation. To assess the policy impact of multi-school zoning, this paper constructs a school district housing market competition model for comparing the impacts of the single- and multi-school dicing policies on housing prices, and uses the reform in Beijing’s Haidian District in April 2018 as an example, confirming the effect of the multi-school dicing policy. The theoretical results show that the multi-school dicing policy pushes families toward average intra-zone housing prices, promoting educational equality but having heterogeneous effects. The empirical results show that the multi-school dicing policy reduced the overall housing prices in Haidian District by 4.5%. In each zone, the prices of houses where the quality of the related educational resource decreased were 0.9% lower, while where the quality of educational resources increased the prices also increased by 0.8%. The average quality of schools and the proportion of high-quality primary schools have emerged as new sources of the inter-zone housing premium. The multi-school dicing policy has thus promoted educational equality but cannot replace high-quality educational resources. Therefore, the government must consider supplying these resources where needed as well