Unawareness and Selective Disclosure: The Effect of School Quality Information on Property Prices
Unawareness and Selective Disclosure: The Effect of School Quality Information on Property Prices
The Australian Government launched the My School website in 2010 to provide standardised information about the quality of schools to the Australian public. This paper combines data from this website with home sale s data for the state of Victoria to estimate the effect of the publication of school quality info rmation on property prices. We use a difference-indifference approach to estimate the causal effect of the releas e of information about high-quality and low-quality schools relative to medium-quality schools in the neighbourhood and find that the release of information about high-quality scho ols increases property prices by 3.6 percent, whereas the release of information about low- quality schools has no significant effect. The findings indicate that many buyers are unaware of the relevance of school quality information and that real estate agents pursue a strategy of disclosing information about high-quality schools to increase the sales pri ce. Results from a survey of Victorian real estate agents provide evidence in fa vor of this strategy.