The Impact of Rising Residential Land Cost on Divorce Rate

摘要

style="text-align:justify;"> Based on the data of 118 cities residential land cost and divorce rate data in China from 2008 to 2015, this paper analyzes the impact of rising residential land cost on divorce rate by using the pooled OLS model and the two-way panel fixed effect model. The divorce rate of cities with home buying restrictions is corrected due to some phenomena of fake divorce. The empirical results show that rising residential land cost significantly increases the divorce rate. For every 1 percent increase of residential land price, divorce rate increases by 0.10 thousandth. Furthermore, the impact is heterogeneous for different regions of China. The rising residential land cost significantly increases the divorce rate of eastern and central regions, with the impact in eastern region higher than that in central part, but has no significant effect on the divorce rate of the western region. The government should take measures to reduce the cost of residential land, such as strengthening the supervision of the residential land bidding, or increasing the land use planning of indemnificatory housing appropriately. Furthermore, the government can design purchase policy to further screen fake divorce or to avoid fake divorce, such as linking the purchase policy to individuals rather than family units to limit the purchase of multiple sets of real estate.