In this paper I show how the monetary value that parents place on school quality may be inferred from their choice of residential location. The method identifies the valuation that parents place on school quality from the differential effect that measures of school quality have on the residential choices of households with and without children. I implement the method with data from the U.S. Census for Washington, D.C. using residential location decisions in 1990. For whites I find that school quality is an important determinant of residential choices and that households with children in the top income quintile are willing to pay $3,300 for schools that generate a 100 SAT point advantage. The evidence does not indicate that the choices of African Americans are influenced by school quality, which suggests that this group may be constrained in their location choices.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in its series Working Paper Series with number
WP-99-7.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)