Canceling the admission priority of private schools enlarges housing price gap in public school districts: Evidence from Shanghai's new admission policy
研究上海2018年取消民办学校优先录取权的政策对公办学校质量资本化的影响，发现该政策平均使公办学校质量每提高一个标准差，房价额外上涨2%，但主要由顶尖学区（前5%）驱动（额外上涨8.6%），非顶尖学区无显著变化，表明政策扩大了学区间的房价差距，可能加剧教育不平等。
Abstract In 2018, Shanghai implemented an admission policy that canceled the admission priority of private schools to promote education equity. Since this policy is a unique measure for adjusting private and public school competition and discouraging private school choice priority, little is known about the policy effects. In this research, to examine the impact of the new admission policy on the capitalization of public education quality, we apply boundary fixed effect and Difference in Differences (DID) analysis to housing transaction records before and after the policy. The admission policy on average led to an additional 2% housing price premium for every standard deviation increase in public school quality. However, this average increase in premium was mainly driven by elite (top 5%) school districts, where an additional 8.6% housing price premium was generated by the policy. Housing prices in nonelite school districts, on the other hand, demonstrated no significant changes. These results indicate that the policy enlarges the housing price gap among school districts with different education quality. Thus, rather than promoting education equity, this policy may overall worsen the housing affordability in good public‐school districts and make access to quality education more exclusive.