Land availability and housing price in China: Empirical evidence from nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL)

Abstract

Housing cost in China has reached an all-time high, preventing millions of people from purchasing a home. Land is a pre-requisite for the housing market. Land-relevant factors such as land regulation, land supply, land price, land use, and mixed land uses have been discussed with respect to land availability and China’s housing price. A nonlinear relationship that affects housing price and land availability is known as the asymmetric effect. Hence, the objective of this study is to investigate the asymmetric effect of land availability on housing price, taking into account GDP, inflation, and interest rate. The NARDL model is employed using the quarterly data from 2005:Q2 to 2017:Q4. The results prove that land availability possesses an asymmetric effect on China’s housing price in the long run. The positive changes in land availability possess a greater effect on the housing price than the negative changes in land availability do. This result implies that policy makers should be inclined to increase the land availability to lower the housing price rather than reducing the land availability to evade housing price hikes. Last, for policy implementation, policy makers should reconsider the demanders’ preferences, the development of mixed land use, and separate regulation of different regions.