Fairer Schooling for Better Housing Affordability : Evidence from the Beijing Multi-Dicing and Six-Year-One-Position Policies

Premium public educational resources are scarce, and their accessibility is usually associated with the ownership and location of residential property in many countries such as China. With the aims of improving equality in allocating educational resources and suppressing the rapid growth of housing prices in the school zones of high-ranked public schools, the Beijing government rolled out its six-year-one-position and multi-dicing policies, which undermine the association between residential property ownership and public school enrolment. These two policies provide an ideal experimental setting that adopts a spatial difference-in-differences design to investigate whether geographically equalizing educational resources can improve housing affordability. We find that implementing these two policies reduces housing prices by 2.4% to 2.9% in implementing districts in general and by 4.4% to 7.9% in the school zones of high-ranked public primary schools. Further, we identify a panic buying effect caused by the announcement of the two policies, which leads to an increase in housing prices in the school zones of high-ranked public schools and policy-implementing districts in general before implementation