Preferences for single-sex schools: Evidence from the housing market

Abstract

We explore preferences for single-sex secondary schools by examining whether house prices vary at the borders of single-sex and coeducational school zones. To do this we develop a novel clustered boundary discontinuity design. This improves over existing methods in providing better control for locational variation in housing prices. Using data for Sydney, Australia, we find a price premium of around 2% for homes in single-sex school zones relative to comparable homes across the border in coeducational school zones. This price premium is robust across a range of models and cluster sizes.