In brief... House Prices and School Quality: Evidence from State and Private Education in Paris

It is now widely understood that the quality of state schools in a neighbourhood has an impact on local house prices. Analysing data for Paris, Gabrielle Fack and Julien Grenet have looked deeper into this link by exploring how the presence of private schools influences parents' willingness to pay to live near good state schools.School catchment areas, France, private education, public education, housing, house prices

When do Better Schools Raise Housing Prices? Evidence from Paris Public and Private Schools

In this paper, we investigate how housing prices react to the quality of education offered by neighbouring public and private schools. The organization of secondary schooling in the city of Paris, which combines residence-based-assignment to public schools with a well-developed and almost entirely publicly funded private school system, offers a valuable empirical context for analyzing how private schools affect the capitalization of public school performance in housing prices. Using comprehensive data on both schools and real estate transact ions over the period 1997-2004, we develop a matching framework to carefully compare sales across school attendance boundaries. We find that a standard deviation increase in public school performance raises housing prices by 1.4 to 2.4%. Moreover, we show that the capitalization of public school performance in the price of real estate shrinks as the availability of private schools increases in the neighbourhood. Our results confirm the predictions of general equilibrium models of school choice that private schools, by providing an advantageous outside option to parents, tend to mitigate the impact of public school performance on housing prices.School attendance zones, private schools, housing markets,residential segregation

Why Are Low-Income Households Paying Increasingly High Rents? The Effect of Housing Benefit in France (1973-2002)

Since the late 1970s, means-based rent assistance has become the main housing policy instrument to the detriment of building subsidies. Yet the development of this assistance has gone hand in hand with an increase in the cost of housing for the most disadvantaged tenant households. We seek to evaluate the impact of this on the increase in rents for low-income households. The early-1990s reform of the extension of assistance constitutes a natural experiment whereby the effects of housing benefits can be isolated, since it was applied solely to certain types of households and not others. We use data from the INSEE Housing surveys to show that the assistance could well have a lot to do with the increase in rents per square metre for low-income households. The estimates obtained show that 50% to 80% of the housing benefit received by these households has been absorbed by increases in their rents.Housing Benefit, Subsidy Incidence

The effect of tax enforcement on tax elasticities: evidence from charitable contributions in France

In the “sufficient statistics” approach, the optimal tax rate is usually expressed as a function of tax elasticities that are often endogenous to other policy instruments available to the tax authority, such as the level of information, enforcement, etc. In this paper we provide evidence that both the magnitude and the anatomy of tax elasticities are extremely sensitive to a particular policy instrument: the level of tax enforcement. We exploit a natural experiment that took place in France in 1983, when the tax administration tightened the requirements to claim charitable deductions. The reform led to a substantial drop in the amount of contributions reported to the administration, which can be credibly attributed to overreporting of charitable contributions before the reform, rather than to a real change in giving behaviors. We show that the reform was also associated with a substantial decline in the absolute value of the elasticity of reported contributions. This finding allows us to partially identify the elasticity of overreporting contributions, which is shown to be large and inferior to − 2 in the lax enforcement regime. We further show using bunching of taxpayers at kink-points of the tax schedule that the elasticity of taxable income also experienced a significant decline after the reform. Our results suggest that failure to account for the effect of tax enforcement on both the magnitude and the anatomy of the elasticity of the tax base with respect to the net of tax rate can lead to misleading policy conclusions, both for the global optimal tax rate (when all policy instruments are optimized) and the local optimal tax rate (conditional on all othe

Improving College Access and Success for Low-Income Students: Evidence from a Large Need-Based Grant Program

International audienceUsing comprehensive administrative data on France's single largest financial aid program, this paper provides new evidence on the impact of large-scale need-based grant programs on the college enrollment decisions, persistence, and graduation rates of low-income students. We exploit sharp discontinuities in the grant eligibility formula to identify the impact of aid on student outcomes at different levels of study. We find that the provision of 1,500 euros cash allowances to prospective undergraduate or graduate students increases their college enrollment rates by 5 to 7 percent. Moreover, we show that need-based grants have positive effects on student persistence and degree completion

Beyond Truth-Telling: Preference Estimation with Centralized School Choice and College Admissions

We propose novel approaches and tests for estimating student preferences with data from centralized matching mechanisms, like the Gale-Shapley Deferred Acceptance, when students are strictly ranked by, e.g., test scores. Without requiring truth-telling to be the unique equilibrium, we show that the matching is (asymptotically) stable, or justified-envy-free, implying that every student is matched with her favorite school/college among those she is qualified for ex post. Having illustrated the approaches in simulations, we apply them to school choice data from Paris and demonstrate evidence supporting stability but not truth-telling. We discuss when each approach is more appropriate in real-life settings

Beyond Truth-Telling: Preference Estimation with Centralized School Choice and College Admissions

We propose novel approaches and tests for estimating student preferences with data from centralized matching mechanisms, like the Gale-Shapley Deferred Acceptance, when students are strictly ranked by, e.g., test scores. Without requiring truth-telling to be the unique equilibrium, we show that the matching is (asymptotically) stable, or justified-envy-free, implying that every student is matched with her favorite school/college among those she is qualified for ex post. Having illustrated the approaches in simulations, we apply them to school choice data from Paris and demonstrate evidence supporting stability but not truth-telling. We discuss when each approach is more appropriate in real-life settings

Rapport d'évaluation de l'assouplissement de la carte scolaire

Ce présent rapport vise à fournir une évaluation aussi complète que possible des effets de l’assouplissement de la carte scolaire en France, au regard des objectifs assignés à la réforme de 2007 : élargir le choix des familles et favoriser la mixité scolaire

Carte scolaire et prix immobiliers à Paris

À partir de données éducatives et immobilières très riches, cette étude montre que l’attractivité des collèges publics a un impact significatif sur le prix de vente des logements à Paris. L’analyse indique également que la présence locale de collèges privés tend à réduire l’impact de la carte scolaire sur les prix immobiliers, dans la mesure où ces établissements permettent d’échapper aux contraintes de la sectorisation