Housing Choice Under School Admission Uncertainty: Evidence From China's School Lottery
利用北京学区摇号政策作为准实验，研究发现摇号降低了顶级学区房的溢价但提高了次顶级学区房的溢价，家庭倾向于选择入学概率更高的学区房，这削弱了政策缩小学区房与非学区房价格差距的效果。
ABSTRACT To relieve the strain on public school seats and mitigate competition for elite schools, Beijing introduced a school lottery that somewhat severed the link between housing and school assignments. Using housing transaction data from Beijing, we leverage the school lottery as a quasi‐experiment to examine how school admission uncertainty affects parental decisions on housing choice. Our findings show that, while the school lottery reduced the school‐quality premiums of Tier 1 school district houses (SDHs), it improved the premiums of Tier 2 SDHs. Besides, the lottery had heterogeneous effects in different school zonings. In zonings with more elite schools, premiums of SDHs either increased or remained unaffected. These indicate that households, in response to admission uncertainty introduced by the lottery, tended to choose SDHs with higher admission probabilities. This new pattern of housing choice mitigated the policy effect on narrowing price gaps between SDHs and non‐SDHs, which was an unintended consequence from the policymakers' perspectives.