The Mystery of Housing Price Differentiation:A Perspective of Income Uncertainty
In the past decade,China's housing prices have shown obvious regional differentiation characteristics,but traditional supply and demand factors such as population mobility and land supply cannot perfectly explain the phenomenon of housing price differentiation.This paper ar-gues that income uncertainty is an important perspective to explain the inter-regional differentia-tion of housing prices.This paper constructs a dynamic general equilibrium model that includes heterogeneous investors and focuses on the impact of income uncertainty on housing prices in dif-ferent regions.It is found that income uncertainty accelerates the rise of housing prices in areas with population inflows and squeezes out consumption and the real economy.Mechanistic analysis shows that due to financial imperfections,people tend to hold housing assets with a"liquidity premium",and housing demand is more sensitive to changes in expected returns than to changes in current prices.In the case of rising uncertainty,people will preventively increase the holding of housing assets to improve the expected return on housing assets.At the same time,the ag-glomeration of the population from low-tier cities to high-tier cities will inevitably increase the de-mand for investment in high-quality real estate through the traditional mechanism of supply and demand,so the preventive savings mechanism amplifies the traditional mechanism of supply and demand,and the joint effect of the two is greater than the independent effect of the two,which increases the gap in the housing price(growth rate)between high-tier cities and low-tier cities.Finally,this paper carries out a policy analysis,examining the policies of indemnificatory hous-ing supply,expanding investment channels,and"housing without speculation"in the two core dimensions of"alleviating the contradiction between supply and demand"and"stabilizing the market expectation".It is found that these policies can alleviate the phenomenon of housing price differentiation brought about by the abovementioned joint effects,and inhibit the decline of do-mestic demand and the trend of the economy shifting from real to virtual.
income uncertaintyhousing price differentiationindemnificatory housingshift from real to virtual economy
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