Do federally-mandated school performance measures affect housing values: Evidence from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

4-2008

Publisher

Western Social Science Association

Abstract

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires states receiving federal (Title I) aid to elementary and secondary schools to adopt a standardized student outcome-based accountability system for measuring and reporting school performance. NCLB’s purpose is to identify and improve poorly performing schools. Local governments, and school districts in particular, often rely on local property taxes for a substantial portion of their revenue, and it is well established that the quality of neighborhood public schools is reflected in housing prices. Therefore, an unintended consequence of NCLB may be to further reduce property values, leading to neighborhood turnover and lower property tax revenues in poorly performing school districts. Given the availability of multiple indicators of school quality (e.g. spending per pupil, test scores), there is considerable disagreement in the literature about the impact of any one type of indicator. Nevertheless, our preliminary findings suggest that, even controlling for other measures of school quality, NCLB reports affect housing prices. Using single family residential sales data from the Las Vegas metropolitan area, this study uses both traditional and spatial econometric methods to estimate the impact of the NCLB reporting system on housing values for multiple years.

Keywords

Nevada – Las Vegas; Housing – Prices; Public schools; School improvement programs; Schools – Ratings and rankings; Value

Disciplines

Business | Education | Real Estate

Language

English

Comments

Conference held in Denver, CO in April, 2008.

Permissions

Use Find in Your Library, contact the author, or use interlibrary loan to garner a copy of the article. Publisher copyright policy allows author to archive post-print (author’s final manuscript). When post-print is available or publisher policy changes, the article will be deposited


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