The Housing Market Effects of Local Home Purchase Restrictions: Evidence from Beijing
Author(s)
Sun, Weizeng; Zheng, Siqi; Wang, Rui; Geltner, David M.; Geltner, David M
Download11146_2016_9586_ReferencePDF.pdf (1.205Mb)
OPEN_ACCESS_POLICY
Open Access Policy
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Home prices have surged in major Chinese cities, leading to concerns of asset price bubbles and housing affordability. The policy of home purchase restrictions (HPR) has been one of China’s harshest housing market interventions to squeeze out speculative demand and dampen the soaring home prices. Beijing was the first city to implement the HPR. Employing the regression discontinuity design technique, we find that Beijing’s HPR policy triggered a 17–24 % decrease in resale price, a drop in the price-to-rent ratio of about a quarter of its mean value, and a deep (1/2 to 3/4) reduction in the transaction volume of the for-sale market, with no significant change in the rent or the transaction volume of rental units. In submarkets where housing supply was less elastic, the effects of the HPR were larger in price and smaller in quantity, suggesting that wealthy buyers likely benefited more from the HPR. The scope of the analysis does not allow conclusions regarding the persistence or longevity of these effects.
Date issued
2016-10Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and PlanningJournal
The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics
Publisher
Springer US
Citation
Sun, Weizeng et al. “The Housing Market Effects of Local Home Purchase Restrictions: Evidence from Beijing.” The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics 55, 3 (October 2017): 288-312 © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISSN
0895-5638
1573-045X