| We use the "natural experiment" method to study how some "exogenous shocks" affect the housing market. Here "exogenous shock" refers to the policy or environment change rather than housing market itself. In the thesis they include: change of monetary policy such as interest rate, happening of natural disasters such as Wenchuan Earthquake and move of power plant. Specifically, the perspectives contain the impact of monetary policy change on the decision-making of mortagage, the phenomenon of overreaction in the housing market, the impact of Wenchuan Earthquake on the change of housing choice preference for households and the impact of natural environment change on the housing price. Among these exogenous shocks, the reason why the natural experiment method is employed to study the impact of monetary policy change on the decision-making of mortagage is that the same monetary policy will work differently for different group people:some are influenced by the policy while some are not, and the control group and treatment group are formed naturally. This can be considered as quasi-experiment in the literature, which is well illustrated by Meyer (1995).In order to analyze the above precisely, several high-quality micro datasets are employed in our research, which include the loans transaction data from commercial banks, market micro survey data and the housing market transaction data. Specifically, the former is the individual loan transaction sample which is around 30 thousand observations, the middle is the whole-sample transaction micro data including 15 districts and counties in Chengdu before and after the Wenchuan Earthquake which is around 4 hundred thousand observations, and the latter is the survey data from the questionnaires before and after the Wenchuan earthquake. The main content and findings are as follows:The change of interest rate from the central bank has significant impact on the housing market, especially on the decision-making of individual loans. The results show that, the probability of individual choice of short-run loan will increase 7.5-8.4 percent points if the difference between short-run and long-run interest rate increase 0.1 percent points. Furthermore, using the natural experiment of change in differentials of commercial housing lending rate and the accumulation funds rate, we can deal with the endogeneity problem in the model well. Thus, it provides the empirical checks for the valid of long and short interest rate policies. In addition, we also found that, the down payment rate policy were not be implemented rigorously by the local banks. Hence, the government should pay more attention on the regulatory of interest rate on the housing market, including the down payment rate.Through the survey, we do a research on the current housing consumption in Chengdu City after "5.12 Wenchuan" Earthquake, and do a comparison with the survey data before that. It concludes that the impact of earthquake on the decision-making of potential purchasers. Specifically, the happen of earthquake has little effect on whether or not people to buy houses, but has a significant impact on the type of houses and factors which affect housing purchase such as the quality of developers and the floor nuber of the houses. With respect to the floor, people tend to prefer buying low-floor houses, but this preference of choice dilute as the time goes by.Furthermore, in order to verify the authenticity of the survey findings, we study the real housing transaction dataset before and after Wenchuan Earthquake and find the earthquake indeed decrease the housing value by around RMB 37,210 per unit, which accounts for 8% of the whole value on average. From the housing floor price difference and the difference change trend, we also find, in one year after earthquake housing prices of different floors act in a significant reverse trend:the high floor housing price dropped firstly and then converge to the same level of pre-earthquake while the lower floor (especially Villa) housing price increased and then dropped very quickly. Based on overreaction theory(such as Be Bondt and Thaler,1985; Brooks et al.,2003), we conclude that just like capital market there is also "Overreaction" in housing market.In addition, in order to verify the above findings further, we do more robustness checks. Firstly, we describe the different housing properties including villa, common multi-floors, lift apartment, and houses for both commerce and living respectively. Secondly, we replace the dependent variable with average housing price and run regressions after getting rid of the inflation factors. Thirdly, we provide a classification description of the policies aiming to regulate the market. It turns out that all conclusions are robust. This study will give a good explanation to the housing price with high volatility and also provide some guidance and references for the policy-making.Besides the above results, this thesis also studies the impact of natural environment change on the housing price. Employing the nature experiment of transiting of Huaneng Power Plant and Chengdu Heat Power Plant, we found that the change of environment towards better indeed increase the housing price significantly.The main innovation and contribution of the thesis contain:The technique and method seams unique, which means that the natural experiment method are seldom used in the real estate field, especially in the current domestic literature. Because of the random property, employing natural experiment method can deal with the endogeneity in economic problem in a great extent, and thus play an important role in checking whether the theoretical problems are true or not.The datasets using in the thesis are quite difficult to obtain in both home and abroad. In particular, the household loans dataset has never been employed to investigate the individual behavior since Deng et.al (2005) which used some banks loans dataset of Beijing as far as I am concerned. Another dataset on housing transaction seams also huge-as large as 4 hundred thousand observations-such huge dataset may be used firstly in the current literature.From the view of content, there are at least 3 points to mention.Firstly, this thesis may be the first study to investigate the impact of policy change on the lending behavior of housing mortagage using large sample individual loans micro data. This topic is important since the conclusions can give a good answer to how the monetary policies affect individuals efficiently in the real estate market. In addition, these conclusions can also provide helpful guidance for cenral bank on how to decide the loan interest rate term structures and avoid the loan risks.Secondly, another emphasis of the thesis is to discuss the overreaction problem in the housing market. This phenomenon have been paid lots of attentions in financial market such as stock market, bond market or interest market in the previous literature, while which is not mentioned in the housing area. This may be the first study to investigate the existence of overreaction phenomenon in the housing market in view of behavior economics, and also another empirical study of new housing price abnormality after the finding of housing price season abnormality by Rachel and Tenreyro (2008). Meanwhile, studying this problem deeply will give an empirical support for the government to consider the psychological change when implement policies so as to be more efficient in future.Last but not the least, this thesis studies the impact of transiting of power plants on the housing price, which may be the first study in current Chinese literature, though several foreign literatures may touch this topic. This empirical study can support the Low Carbon Economy strongly, which kind of development mode is advocated by the current government.
|
PDF Full Text Request