Housing Prices，Public Goods and the Willingness of Floating Populations to Stay in the City

Abstract

In recent years, floating populations have continued to gather in large cities with high levels of economic development, and housing prices in these cities have continued to rise. Based on these two characteristic facts, this paper empirically investigates the relationship between urban housing prices and the willingness of floating populations to stay in the city by using the matching datasets of the national dynamic monitoring survey of floating populations and urban housing prices in 2012 and 2014. This study finds that under the premise of controlling a series of variables, urban hosing prices have an inverted U-shaped effect on the willingness of floating populations to stay in the city. In view of the inverted U-shaped effect of housing prices on the willingness of migrants to stay in the city, this paper attempts to explain floating populations’ demand for city public goods. Housing prices are highly correlated with the city’s education resource supply capacity. Due to the different family life cycle, as children’s age grows, the inflection point of housing prices rises first and then declines. When the age of children is in the compulsory education stage, the inflection point is the highest. By performing regression of different ages of floating populations, we find that the inflection point of housing prices among the 35−45-year-old floating population maintains a higher position. This corresponds precisely to the age at which the first children of most of floating populations enter the stage of education. Floating populations are willing to withstand higher housing prices in order to enjoy the educational resources in the city for their children. After carrying out a series of robustness tests, the conclusions still exist.