Quantile effect of educational facilities on housing price: Do homebuyers of higher-priced housing pay more for educational resources?

Abstract

Educational facilities are valued highly by citizens and play an important part in improving housing prices. Most existing studies applied the hedonic price model to obtain the average effects of educational facilities on housing prices. However, these effects may be heterogeneous in different conditional quantiles of housing prices. Aside from the average effects, scholars are also interested in the different behaviors of high-, medium-, and low-priced homebuyers, behaviors that cannot be simply explained by ordinary least-squares estimation without sample truncation. To fill this gap, this study utilizes quantile and spatial quantile regression models to obtain a complete description of the entire distribution. On the basis of 2015 housing transaction data in Hangzhou, substantial differences are identified in the effects of educational facilities on housing price across the conditional distribution. In particular, primary and secondary schools considerably improve housing prices over the entire conditional distribution, whereas kindergartens are only valued by homebuyers of lower- and higher-priced housing. Furthermore, only households of high-priced housing are willing to pay a premium for the accessibility of senior high schools and universities. The effect of spatial dependence on higher-priced housing is more pronounced than that on lower-priced housing, and the consideration of spatial attributes improves the explanatory ability. Empirical results indicate that the average effects of educational facilities on housing prices obtained by existing studies that used the traditional hedonic price model is far from adequate in shedding light on this real-world phenomenon. In particular, the quantile effect should be further revealed to obtain an in-depth understanding.