School proximity and housing price capitalization in China’s secondary market: hedonic and quantile regression evidence from Xi’an and Zhengzhou

This paper examines how proximity to key middle schools is capitalized into housing prices in urban China and whether the magnitude of this effect is associated with differences in the broader educational environment of the city. The study addresses the question of whether school-related housing premiums differ between otherwise comparable cities with distinct higher education ecosystems. Using micro-level data on secondary housing sale listings from the Lianjia platform (February 2022), we estimate hedonic price models separately for Xi’an and Zhengzhou, two second-tier Chinese cities similar in economic scale but differing substantially in higher education resources. Ordinary least squares models with heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors are complemented by quantile regressions to assess heterogeneity across price segments. Distance to the nearest key middle school is negatively and statistically significantly associated with housing prices in both cities. However, the magnitude of capitalization differs markedly: a one-kilometer increase in distance reduces prices by approximately 3.5% in Xi’an compared to 1.2% in Zhengzhou. Quantile regressions reveal moderate heterogeneity in Zhengzhou, where the school premium is stronger in the lower price segment, while in Xi’an the effect remains relatively stable across quantiles. The study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that school-related housing premiums may be associated not only with assignment rules but also with broader differences in the urban educational ecosystem. By combining a cross-city comparative design with quantile analysis, the paper provides new evidence on how educational resource concentration may be related to housing market outcomes.