Study On Local Government Housing Regulation Behavior

In recent years,China's housing market has shown an irrational boom and housing prices have risen rapidly,especially in first-tier cities and major second-tier cities.Housing prices have far exceeded the income level of most residents,and rising house prices have become the focus of attention in China's macroeconomic regulation.In order to promote the stable and healthy development of the real estate market and protect the people's basic living needs,the Chinese government has introduced a series of multi-dimensional regulation and control policies.For more than a decade,the central government has implemented multiple rounds of housing price control policies,mainly administrative measures such as purchase restriction and loan restriction,but fails to achieve expected outcome.Scholars believe that there are many reasons for the poor regulation and control.One of the most important reasons is the behavior of local governments.Housing markets and socio-economic developments are different in different regions of China,and local governments have been given greater discretion in the formulation and implementation of housing market policies.Due to China's fiscal and taxation system and the promotion and evaluation mechanism for local officials,local governments,for their own interests,do not want housing prices to fall and lack the enthusiasm for implementing strong affordable housing policies.As a result,they may fail to fully implement the central government's policies on housing price regulation and affordable housing.So clarifying the local governments' behavioral logic,incentive mechanisms as well as subsequent effects of housing regulation on local housing markets is of great significance to unearth the deep-seated reasons for the poor effect of current housing regulation policies in China,and to establish a long-term mechanism for stable and healthy development of the real estate market.Existing literatures related to the research of local government housing regulation are mostly focus on theoretical discussion.Due to the complex behaviors of local governments,it is difficult to select indicators for accurate quantification.The existing research mainly focuses on a specific type of short-term behavior.There is no systematic analysis of the characteristics and effects of local government's overall regulatory behavior.More importantly,the low availability of relevant data directly leads to a lack of empirical research,making it difficult to scientifically assess the current state of local government housing regulation and its impact on the housing market.This thesis will carry out theoretical and empirical research on these issues.The research idea is: First of all,based on sufficient theoretical research,clearly define the research object and scope.Local governments are defined as municipalities / prefecture-level city governments based on their actual control of economic resources and political rights,and the housing market localization in China.Due to the complexity of regulatory actions,referring to related research,the direct housing regulation actions of local governments can be summarized into two aspects: the one is regulation measures of housing prices to maintain the stability of the housing market,such as housing purchase restriction,price-limiting policies and loan limit policies.These are the regulation and control behaviors aimed at the demand side;the other is those regulations that guarantee the fairness of housing,such as the guarantee behavior of affordable housing supply as well as cash subsidies.These are the regulation and control behaviors at the supply side.Secondly,after clarifying the research object and scope,we take China's urban government as the research object to conduct empirical analysis of its housing price regulation and affordable housing behaviors.The empirical analysis of both types of behaviors follows the steps of status quo assessment,impact mechanism,and path of effect.Finally,combining theoretical and empirical research,this thesis proposes scientific and reasonable countermeasures.The chapters are arranged as follows: a review of the relevant domestic and international research progress of Chapter 2and a theoretical summary of Chapter 3;Chapters 4 to 7 of the dissertation conduct empirical research on local government housing price regulation and affordable housing behaviors.Chapter 8 is the main conclusions and policy recommendations.In response to the rising housing prices,purchase and loan restrictions are common measures used by local governments to regulate housing prices.However,the implementation of policies such as purchase and loan restrictions in different cities has quite different requirements thus it is difficult to accurately quantify their implementation efforts.From a national perspective,only a small number of cities implemented such policies.Compared with the characteristics of short-term and limited scope of purchase and loans restrictions,housing provident fund is a long-established system established in each city of China.In addition,the provident fund has the characteristics of territorial management and local governments have the rights to manage and supervise the deposits,withdrawal and loans of local housing provident fund.Therefore,provident funds are a good starting point for measuring the behavior of local governments.The data analysis of the thesis also found that the adjustment strength and direction of the provident fund are similar to behaviors such as purchase restriction.This thesis uses data mining technology to conduct empirical research from the perspective of housing provident funds,through collecting and sorting multi-dimensional data on housing provident fund deposits,withdrawals,loans,and capital operations in cities at and above the national level to build a provident fund database.The thesis innovatively selects the personal housing loan ratio of the provident fund and the ratio of newly added loans to the balance of deposits to quantify the local government's housing price regulation behavior for evaluation.Based on the scientific evaluation of housing price adjustment behaviors,combined with the city's socioeconomic data and China Household Finance Survey(CHFS)micro data,it empirically tests the impact mechanism of behavior and the effects on housing prices and housing consumption.The thesis tries to answer the direction of the local government's housing price regulation behavior,whether it is completely consistent with the central government,what are the core factors leading to this behavior,and what kind of impact it will have on the entire housing market.For affordable housing,there is currently a lack of accurate assessment of the level of implementation of affordable housing by local governments.In order to solve practical problems,the thesis conducts a large number of policy documents and data collection and finishing work,establishes an evaluation index of local government affordable housing levels,and empirically studies its influencing factors and effects.The thesis takes the entry threshold of affordable housing as the starting point,combines the completeness of the policy documents for the application of public rental housing in all cities at and above the country level,collects and organizes data from 153 cities,and builds a basic database.The projection pursuit model based on accelerated genetic algorithm was used to calculate the affordable housing access index to evaluate the local government affordable housing behavior.The entry threshold for urban affordable housing is set by the local government,and the level of entry threshold for affordable housing can more stably reflect the level of affordable housing in a city.If the barriers to entry for urban affordable housing are high,the coverage will decrease,indicating that the level of affordable housing in the city is low,and vice versa.Combined with the urban economic geography data and China Household Finance Survey micro data,we empirically test the important influencing factors that affect local government affordable housing behavior and the effect of this behavior on housing prices and housing consumption.The results show that:(1)Even if the central government requires tightened housing control policies,most local governments still implement behaviors that stimulate the housing market or do not respond positively;(2)The stronger the local government's dependence on land finance,the less it hopes that house prices will fall,and the more serious the behavior of stimulating the housing market will be,the more inconsistent the behavior of the central housing price control policy will be.(3)Local government's behavior of stimulating the housing market has a significant positive impact on housing prices.Each 1% increase in the degree of local government stimulus will increase the sales price of commercial housing by0.236%.It has a significant promotion effect on the family purchase of multiple suites,but it has no obvious effect on the purchase of the first suite;(4)Using the policy intervention of the Ministry of Housing and Construction to conduct an empirical test on the evaluation of the stability of house prices,the results show that after the stabilization of house prices is included in the assessment of local governments,the local government's behavior of stimulating the housing market has significantly weakened,which is inconsistent with the central house price regulation;(5)The affordable housing provision level of the city can be seen from the affordable housing accessibility index of the local government.It is found that the entry threshold for affordable housing in the western region is significantly lower than that in the eastern and central regions,regardless of whether it is for residents with hukou or those without local hukou,suggesting that the level of affordable housing provision is relatively high in western regions.(6)Empirical examination of the influential factors of the local government's affordable housing provision is conducted,and it's found that the local government's dependence on land transfer income is a key factor affecting local government's affordable housing supply decision.(7)The affordable housing provision behavior of the local government can have a significant inhibitory effect on local house prices and a substitution effect on households' consumption behavior in the commodity housing market.This substitution effect is particularly obvious among low-and middle-income people.The local government is the main executor of housing regulation,and its behavior is related to the effect of the central regulation policy.According to the conclusion,the paper proposes:(1)In terms of housing price regulation and affordable housing supply,the central government should target different levels of economic development and geographical resource conditions.Cities should formulate corresponding restrictions and standards so that local governments can "strategize for the city" within certain extent.(2)Restructuring the local government incentive mechanism,no longer taking GDP growth as the sole official promotion assessment standard,incorporating price regulation into the local government's assessment system,and preventing and controlling housing financial risks caused by excessive government stimulus to the housing market.(3)Establish a scientific and reasonable affordable housing assessment system,increase affordable housing expenditures,improve the distribution management system,and give full play to its restraining effect on housing prices and the substitution effect of demand for commercial housing.At the same time,continue to expand the coverage of coverage and strengthen the protection of the migrant population,increase the policy's tilt on low-and middle-income families,thus reducing the direct living costs of households,and indirectly increasing income,thereby rapidly increasing the consumption of low-and middle-income families and migrant families.The main contributions of the thesis are as follows:(1)Carrying out a large amount of data collection and finishing work,establishing a national prefecture-level and above urban housing provident fund database and housing security access conditions database,filling up for the gap in China's related database construction.(2)For the first time,comprehensively integrate various types of access conditions for affordable housing programs,form an evaluation index system,and use the model to scientifically estimate the index to represent the difficulty of urban affordable housing access,so as to reflect the level of affordable housing provision and local government behavior of supplying affordable housing.The index can be used for future empirical and quantitative research on housing reform,spatial mismatch,labor mobility,and household consumption.(3)Empirical research on the important issue of local government behavior and housing consumption is rare both domestically and internationally.This article combined the macro data of local government behavior assessment with micro data of the 2017 China Household Financial Survey(CHFS)to conduct an empirical test to clarify the impact of behavior on housing consumption.(4)In order to stabilize housing prices,cities in our country have implemented measures such as purchase restriction,loan restriction,sale restriction,price restriction,and lottery.These measures are basically administrative measures in the short term and their effects are not satisfactory.The thesis attempts to use the perspective of local government behaviors to explore the ways and means of establishing a long-term real estate mechanism from the underlying causes.(5)"Strategy city by city" will become the main theme of China's real estate market regulation in the future.The research object of this thesis is the local government(urban government).It analyzes the current situation of housing price regulation in different cities and the level of affordable housing provision.Restructuring the government's incentive mechanism and making policy recommendations.