Virtualization of Real Estate Industry and Housing Bubbles --Empirical Evidence from China

摘要

In the last twenty years, China has experienced a rapid development in the real estate industry. The continuous rising house price causes many social and economic problems and draws a lot of attentions from academia, business world and government. Many researchers shed light on this problem from different angles, but till today, it hasn’t been fully resolved. In this paper, we try to examine the real estate bubble from a virtual economic perspective. We think that the virtual feature of real estate alters its economic role from a purely living and working place to a financing instrument. We use the newest monthly data of China real estate market from 2006 to 2018 and estimate the relationship between the housing bubble and real estate industry virtualization. We identify a significant positive association between house price index and the purchase price of land in real estate investment. This result suggests that virtual feature of real estate has deepen the bubble problem in the industry and its virtualization degree appears to be closely related to the virtual feature of land and its price proportion to real estate investment.