Investigating the effect of good schools on surrounding housing prices in London

Abstract: In this paper we have looked at the effect good schools have on surrounding house prices, focusing on London. We consider both the effect of “% of students that meet expected standard in math, reading, and writing”, and the new “progression score” that the UK government has introduced. These two scores are used as the basis of how a school is defined as ‘good’. We used two different propensity score matching methods to estimate the effect that good schools have on surrounding house prices. We got different results depending on which matching method we used, and which score to define good schools. “% of students that meet expected standard in math, reading and writing” showed a positive effect for both the Nearest Neighbor method (8.42%) and the Kernel method (3.74%) whereas “progression scores” showed a negative effect for the nearest neighbor method (-9.95%) and positive for the Kernel method (0.59%).