Valuing the built environment : a GIS approach to the hedonic modelling of housing markets.

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The capitalisation of school choice into property prices: a case study of grammar and all ability state schools in Buckinghamshire, UK

There has been a growing academic and policy debate in the UK on the relationship between school choice, educational performance and house prices. School choice and the chances of attending a good school are important as it relates strongly to educational attainment and qualifications, University entry and access to the labour market. This debate was reinvigorated recently when the Conservative Party announced that state schools which select using academic ability (grammar schools) may be able to expand in England for the first time in decades. Some commentators argued that this may exacerbate and re-enforce existing inequalities in the education system by allowing wealthy parents to ‘buy’ into a particular grammar school via the housing market, leading to “selection by mortgage” as well as by academic ability. This research investigates the extent to which state schools are capitalised into house prices using Buckinghamshire in England as a case study. It differentiates between grammar schools and all ability state schools, using a novel multi-level specification of the repeat sales model. It concludes that single sex boys’ grammar schools attract a higher premium than single sex girls’ grammar schools and that in general, grammar schools attract a higher premium than all ability state schools. These premiums are a function of educational attainment and demand for places and tend to vanish once these have been taken into account, although for a small number of schools notable premiums remain, perhaps reflecting school characteristics such as reputation not captured in the models

Mapping Welsh neighbourhood types classified using attitudinal data from the national Living in Wales survey

The paper illustrates the use of contiguous cartograms for mapping the results of a cluster analysis of attitudinal data from the national Living in Wales survey. The analysis and mapping of Welsh national data at small geographical scales is not very common and this is the first time attitudinal data from the Living in Wales survey has been mapped at levels lower than the unitary authority using cartograms. The results demonstrate how Wales can be classified into geographically distinct areas based upon respondents' attitudes towards their neighbours and the neighbourhood within which they live. These areas broadly conform to other metrics used to classify Wales at small scales, such as deprivation indicators, commuting patterns and local housing markets areas. This suggests that people's attitudes towards their neighbours and their neighbourhood are broadly related to socio-economic, demographic and cultural factors that vary across Wales

Geocoding routinely collected administrative data to measure access to alcohol outlets in Wales

ABSTRACT Objectives A substantial level of excess alcohol consumption results in a wide range of harm and the potential impact on health at the population level of a reduction in consumption is considerable. A proposed policy for reducing alcohol consumption is restricting the availability of alcohol through reducing the density of alcohol outlets. We set out to create a high spatial resolution alcohol outlet dataset suitable for evaluating longitudinal changes in chronic alcohol related conditions. Approach Requests were made for the names and location of all licensed alcohol outlets within each of the 22 Unitary Authorities in Wales, between Nov 2005 and Dec 2011. Data requested for each outlet consisted of: the date permission was granted or the licence became active, the licence expiry date or an indicated date of outlet closure, whether this premise is licensed for ON and/or OFF premise sales, the hours permissible to sell alcohol or general opening hours of the outlet and the type of premise as assigned by the LA if available. Our approach included collating, geocoding and manually matching alcohol outlet data received from each unitary authority for use in a longitudinal analysis of outlet density. Results All authorities were able to provide an actual or approximate license issue date, allowing us to summarise the number of outlets annually. Several authorities were unable to provide precise outlet closure dates, so the date of the last interaction with the outlet was used to generate an approximate end date. One-half of the unitary authorities were able to provide the On/Off sales status of outlets, and 9 were able to provide opening hours. From these data we were able to geocode 53% (range 28% to 72% by local authority) using GIS, the remaining 47% were matched using Google products to verify and extract a precise geographic location. Conclusions The collation and processing of retrospective alcohol outlet data was successfully completed to enable the building of a longitudinal exposure dataset. There was considerable variation between the unitary authorities in the quality of address data, and data related to the availability of alcohol, for example opening hours. The lack of address structure required us to devise a manual address matching process to capture the addresses that could not be geocoded. To aid future data linkage based evaluations to provide policy evidence in a timely manner, local government datasets should use standardised data fields, including addresses and Point-of-Capture address verification