The Effect Of House On Chinese Residents’ Happiness

With the development of Chinese economy, People begin to pay more and more attention to their own happiness while they are sharing the growing material benefits. As the most important part of material wealth of family, house acts an extremely crucial role in people’s lives and production. In recent years, the domestic housing prices continue to rise, the phenomenon of hierarchical housing begins to edge up, housing consumption is gradually becoming the key factor in influencing the level of residents’ welfare. Therefore, under the background of the stagnation of "happiness”, it’s particularly necessary to investigate the influence of housing consumption on the residents’ well-being.This paper mainly explores the overall effects of the impact of housing prices, housing quantity and housing area on the residents’ well-being, as well as the structure influences behind them, and then reveals the policy implications. The results show that housing price in China’s estate market is much high, but the regional difference is even very big; the rising of house price has significantly decreased resident’s well-being, the faster the housing price increases, the lower residents’ well-being level will be. For every percentage point increase in housing price, the probability that people feel very unhappy will surge about 2.43 percent, and the probability that people feel very happy will decline about 47.53 percent; Both housing quantity and housing area have positive effects on residents’ happiness, the marginal effect of housing prices on resident’s well-being is higher than housing area and quantity; By group testing, We further find that the effect of housing consumption on residents’ happiness vary according to area, hukou and sex. Residents in the west and middle areas will decrease by “crowing-out effect “derived from rising housing price, while in eastern areas, “demonstration effect” can improve resident’s well-being. Agriculture pay more attention to housing quantity, but citizens are more sensitive about housing area. Men appear to be acutely affected by the negative effects of rising house price. Based on these studies, this paper gives several suggestions such as enhancing macro- control real estate market and deepening financial products innovation as well as changing the concept of buying house to stabilize housing prices and increase residents’ happiness.This research can not only contributed enormously to the enrichment and perfection of the current theory, discover a new perspective for” Easterlin paradox”, but also can provide a theoretic and empirical support to control housing price and implement public policy about happiness, which is of great significance to build a harmonious society and to achieve the goal of China’s dream concerning national prosperity and rejuvenation as well as the residents’ happiness.