Structural and policy changes in the Chinese housing market

Housing price becomes a popular topic among nearly most of the investors in major Chinese cities. Recently, the housing markets appears to have shown signs of overheating and nonstationary trends, attributable to the collapse of the global economic environment and the introduction of local policies. The purpose of this study is to investigate if abrupt structural changes, which can be viewed as the effectiveness of government regulations and economic events but hidden in the housing price index, exist. An improved nonparametric statistical model, namely the wavelet detection technique, is introduced in this paper, based on which jump point(s) can be identified. Our empirical study illustrates that the domino effect as suggested by the detected change points are, geographically, from south to north, and from east to west, in contrast with general understanding. This may be a result of the owner-occupier demand in China’s housing markets.