The Effect of School Closures on Housing Prices in Hamilton, Ontario

Abstract

Is school accessibility a valued good, and do school closures affect house prices? This thesis applies two different methods of hedonic regression analysis, augmented by spatial regression methods, to a dataset of Hamilton real estate transactions (2005-2017) to investigate whether the closure of a school in an urban neighbourhood negatively affects house prices in that closed school catchment. Evidence is found that school accessibility is a valued good, and that the closure of a primary school will negatively affect house prices from the period of closure announcement through several subsequent quarters. The use of spatial analysis corrects for bias in coefficient estimates.