性别失衡对房价的影响 ——来自中国城市的证据

随着中国城市房屋价格持续快速上涨,其背后的深层次原因受到了全社会的广泛关注,现有关于其政策、制度以及经济属性的分析并不能对此做出完全解释。在传统房地产经济学中,住房一直被看作资产和消费品。而本文则从住房作为地位性商品属性的角度入手,讨论性别失衡条件下适婚男性通过购买住房以寻求自身社会地位的提高,进而对房价产生影响的过程与原理。文章在城市性别失衡数据缺失的情况下,依据全国人口普查结果对城市层面的适婚人口性别比做出科学的推算,将该数据与已有统计数据相匹配构建2000-2016年中国285个地级市的面板数据,再利用固定效应模型进行实证分析。研究结果显示,首先,基于地位寻求理论,性别比上升明确增强了住房需求并使之转化为中国实际房价上涨的动因之一。其次,性别失衡对房价的影响存在显著的地区性差异,在婚配市场竞争激烈、住房作为地位性商品特征更为明显的东部地区,性别失衡对抬高房价的影响更为强烈,而在西部地区,这一影响则相对较弱。此外,性别比失衡对房价的影响具有明确的门槛效应,随着房价收入比的提高,性别失衡对房价的影响会逐渐加大;同时,当房价超出绝大部分家庭的支付能力后,住房的地位性商品属性会进一步加强,这将导致房价的持续上涨。

The Impact of Gender Imbalance on Housing Price——Evidence from Chinese Cities

With the continuous and rapid rise of housing prices in Chinese cities,the underlying reasons be?hind the rise are broadly concerned.Analysis of relative policies,institutions,and economic attributes can?not explain this phenomenon perfectly.In traditional real estate economics,housing has always been regard?ed as assets and consumer goods.While this article starts from the perspective of housing as a status good,and discusses the process and theoretical mechanism about the impact of buying a house for marriageable men’s social status by considering the gender imbalance.In the absence of data on urban gender ratio,this paper makes a scientific calculation of the gender ratio of marriageable population at the city level based on the national population census,which can be combined with existing statistics to form a panel data of 285 prefecture-level cities in China from 2000 to 2016.With this panel data,the fixed effect model is used for empirical analysis.Results show that,firstly,based on the theory of status seeking,the increase in gender ratio clearly enhances the housing demand,which causes the rise of real housing prices in China.Secondly,this mechanism has significant regional heterogeneity characteristics.In the eastern region where the mat?ing market is more competitive and status features are more obvious,gender imbalance has a stronger im?pact on raising housing prices,while the impact is relatively weak in the western region.In addition,gender imbalance has a clear threshold effect on housing prices.With the increase of housing price-income ratio,the impact of gender imbalance on housing prices will gradually increase.And when most households can?not afford to pay for a house,the property of housing as a status good will be further strengthened,which will lead to the continuous rise of house prices.