TY  - JOUR
AU  - Kane,Thomas J.
AU  - Staiger,Douglas O.
AU  - Riegg,Stephanie K.
TI  - School Quality, Neighborhoods and Housing Prices: The Impacts of school Desegregation
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11347
PY  - 2005
Y2  - May 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11347
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11347.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Thomas J. Kane
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Center for Education Policy Research
50 Church St., 4th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/496-4359
E-Mail: kaneto@gse.harvard.edu

Douglas O. Staiger
Dartmouth College
Department of Economics
HB6106, 301 Rockefeller Hall
Hanover, NH 03755-3514
Tel: 603/646-2979
Fax: 603/646-2122
E-Mail: douglas.staiger@dartmouth.edu

Stephanie Riegg Cellini
George Washington University
Trachtenberg School of Public Policy
and Public Administration
805 21st Street, NW, MPA 601M
Washington, DC 20052
Tel: 202-994-0019
E-Mail: scellini@gwu.edu
AB  - We study the relationship between school characteristics and housing prices in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina between 1994 and 2001. During this period, the school district was operating under a court-imposed desegregation order and redrew a number of school boundaries. We use two different sources of variation to disentangle the effect of schools and other neighborhood characteristics: differences in housing prices along assignment zone boundaries and changes in housing prices following the change in school assignments. We find systematic differences in house prices along school boundaries, although the impact of schools is only one-quarter as large as the naive cross-sectional estimates would imply. Moreover, house prices seem to react to changes in school assignments. Part of the impact of school assignments is mediated by subsequent changes in the characteristics of the population living in the school zone.
ER  -