This paper investigates the causal effects of air pollution on housing prices in China using a dataset of 65 cities from 2014 to 2021. We employ the central environmental protection inspection (CEPI) as a quasi-natural experiment for air pollution index to show a negative causal relationship between air pollution and housing prices. We also find that this causal relationship is more pronounced for less-developed, manufacturing-intensive and tourismrelied cities. Our results reveal the response to central environmental protection inspection on improvement in regional air pollution protection but its by-effects on housing markets, as the impact is limited if the inspection is conducted repeatedly, suggesting its unsustainability as a regulatory tool.

The implementation of prefabricated housing (PH) has become prevalent in China recently because of its advantages in improving production efficiency and saving energy. However, the benefits of adopting PH cannot always be accrued by the stakeholders because of the arising transaction costs (TCs) in the projects’ development process. This study investigates the strategies for developers to make rational choices for minimizing the TCs of the PH project considering their own attributes and external constraints. A Bayesian Belief Network model was applied as the analytical method, based on the surveys in China. The single sensitive analysis indicated that developers influence the TCs of PH through the three most impactful factors: Prefabrication rate, PH experience, and Contract payment method. Furthermore, combined strategies were recommended for developers in various situations based on the multiple sensitivity analysis. Developers facing high prefabrication rate challenges are suggested to reduce the risks by procuring high-qualified general contractors and adopting unit-price contracts type. For developers with limited PH experience, adopting the Engineering-Procurement-Construction procurement method is the most efficient in reducing their TCs in the context of China’s PH market. This study contributes to the current body of knowledge concerning the effect of traders’ attributes and choices on TCs, expanding the application of TCs theory and fulfilling the study on the determinants of TCs in construction management.

This paper is about investigating how different bank liquidity creation activities affect housing markets. Using data of 401 metropolitan statistical areas/metropolitan statistical area divisions (MSAs/MSADs) of the U.S. between 1990 and 2018, we show that not all bank liquidity creation activities boost the housing markets. In particular, unlike asset- side and off-balance sheet liquidity creations, funding-side liquidity creation dampens housing markets. The relationships between liquidity creation activities and housing markets are stronger in regions with inelastic house supply, but flip when banks face external liquidity shocks. We also find that housing markets dominated by large banks are more sensitive to off-balance sheet liquidity creation activities. Finally, as expected, asset-side and off-balance sheet liquidity creations boost housing markets by driving house prices away from fundamental values. Our results offer a more thorough explanation of how bank liquidity creation fuels the momentum of housing markets.

This paper provides the first theory and evidence on the role of presale policies in the residential housing market. We start with constructing a novel dataset of unfinished projects, presale policies, and land auction outcomes across 270 major cities in China. We then identify 2,330 unfinished residential projects from 2010 to 2017 on a citizen complaint website run by the central government. We find that both presale criterion and postsale supervision of construction costs relate to a lower probability of unfinished projects. But only presale criterion relates negatively to the pace of new housing development, measured by developers' multitasking and land auction outcomes. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the average bundle of presale policies is inferior to the Pareto frontier in our sampled cities. Tightening the regulation on postsale supervision by 2 standard deviations may lead to a 58% reduction in the occurrence of unfinished projects, while keeping the pace of new housing development unchanged. Eliminating unfinished projects would entail a drastic increase in both presale criterion and postsale supervision, with slower housing development.

We document a speculation channel through which house market booms negatively affect entrepreneurship. To address endogeneity concerns, we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in house prices generated by staggered and unintended policy spillovers in China. We find house market speculation triggered by house booms crowds out entrepreneurship. Reduced labor supply, reduced capital supply, and heightened entry costs do not appear to explain our main findings. The negative effect exhibits in the OECD countries as well. Our paper complements the well-documented collateral channel by offering novel evidence on a previously under-explored adverse consequence of house market booms – their hindrance to entrepreneurship.

This study examines how information friction shapes housing market outcomes in Beijing, China. Leveraging administrative micro-level housing resale transactions, we employ a boundary discontinuity design and difference-in-differences model to explore the consequences of prohibiting school-district-quality information disclosure in online listings. Our results show that the prohibition leads to a 2.55% reduction in transaction prices and a 22.99% increase in seller's time on the market for houses corresponding to key primary schools. The extended time on the market is primarily attributed to the heightened challenges that potential buyers face in finding their ideal dwellings.

China’s household wealth is growing rapidly and has become significant worldwide. While the government played an important role in economic growth and wealth accumulation, few research has explained why and how government expenditure redistributes household wealth in China. This study uses China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) household survey (2010-2018) and prefecture-level data to estimate the impact of government expenditure on household wealth, especially the value of housing asset. We find that the capitalization of government expenditure contributes an important part to housing value appreciation, which accounts for more than 50% of household wealth. Furthermore, the impact mechanism of government expenditure on households’ wealth has a substantial redistributive effect. Government expenditures greatly advance the net worth of households who own their houses, especially for households that own two or more houses, but contribute much less to those comprising rental tenants.

This paper comprehensively examines how subjective well-being (SWB) is influenced by various aspects of housing — tenure, living conditions, and housing values — based on an individual panel from the China Household Finance Survey. We employ a two-way fixed effects model to reduce the endogeneity problems of housing choices. Our findings suggest that housing plays a comparable role to income and wealth in SWB and that housing inequality and living experience both matter a great deal. Moreover, the positive impacts of home ownership on SWB reported by prior research are likely quality of life effects masked in home ownership. Results are robust to ordered logistic estimation with individual fixed effects. What we document carries important implications for housing policies, and these are generalizable to other countries.

Using the regression discontinuity design, a quasi-experiment approach, this paper establishes a causal relationship between the down payment requirement and house prices by exploiting a unique institutional background in Shanghai. In the unique setting, the required minimal down payment ratio jumps at the Inner Ring, a circular elevated highway, from 50% to 70% for a large group of buyers. With transaction level data from the largest real estate broker in Shanghai, we find that a lower required down payment ratio increases the apartment price by 138.8 thousand RMB, around 3.71% of the average transaction price.

This paper reviews the current housing crisis in China and explores the roles of supply-demand imbalances and local governments in the real estate sector. To prevent the housing downturn from further dragging down economic growth, Beijing suspended the financing restrictions on developers imposed in August 2020. These restrictions, known as the “three red lines” that limited new borrowing by developers, led Chinese property developers to default on a record number of debt obligations and triggered the most serious housing slump China has seen since 1998. The property sector saw its value added decline by more than 5 percent in 2022, even as the overall economy grew at 3 percent. But the current dynamics in the housing market reflect a repeated pattern: Loosening financing restrictions on developers and using housing as a macroeconomic stabilization tool risks reinforcing the boom-bust housing cycle. China’s real estate sector is a systemic problem. Without serious reforms to address concerns such as supply-demand imbalances and local governments’ deep connections with real estate, housing slumps like the one in 2022 may recur.