Summary:
China is embracing opportunities and challenges as it heads toward a new era of economic upgrading and transformation. China has proposed a plan to build a domestic circle in which economic growth relies on domestic markets more than on international markets. A critical aim of the domestic circle is to boost consumption and increase its contribution to the economy. Household income in China has displayed fast and steady growth over the last few decades. This has increased the demand for housing. As a result, housing now represents the biggest share of household worth in China. An increase in house prices can add to a household's net worth and thus household consumption. Fast-growing house prices also increase mortgage burdens and therefore restrain consumption. The effects of housing wealth on consumption are thus theoretically ambiguous. This is confirmed in the literature. It is therefore interesting in policy and academic terms to explore how changes in housing wealth affect consumption in China. We examine the effect of changes in housing wealth on household consumption and the channels of this effect by utilizing China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) data spanning 2013-2019. The CHFS is a biennial national representative survey, launched in 2011, that records information on household finance positions in 29 of the 34 provinces in China. The survey records details of income, consumption, financial assets, housing wealth, debt, jobs, and demographic characteristics, among many variables. Each round of the survey revisits a set of households that were interviewed in the previous round. We trace a set of households that were surveyed in all the survey rounds from 2013-2019 and build a balanced panel of 13,328 households. When examining the link between housing wealth and consumption in a baseline model, we impose household fixed effects to account for idiosyncratic and time-invariant omitted variables (e.g., beliefs). It is furthermore possible that consumption also affects housing wealth, because consumption is driven by income, which also contributes to housing demand and house prices. We use a province's average house price in the year prior to each round of the survey (i.e., in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018) as the instrumental variable (IV) for the housing wealth of the households in that province. This alleviates the two-way causality. We then re-examine the effect of housing wealth on consumption using the two-stage least squares and fixed effects methods. The results show that an increase in housing wealth raises household consumption, with a marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth (house-price MPC) averaging at 2%. Increases in housing wealth furthermore reduce the share of life necessities in consumption and raise that of hedonic goods, thus increasing household consumption. Additional investigations show that housing wealth influences household consumption via a collateral channel that relaxes borrowing constraints and finances consumption growth as house prices rise. As home equity loans are not available in China, part of the credit for the consumption growth is from credit cards. We find evidence that as house prices increase, credit card limits and balances both go up. This implies that credit cards provide funding for the housing wealth effect. Finally, we find that the housing wealth effect on consumption is stronger for households with a second home and for households in central and western China. We make two main contributions. First, we identify a house-price MPC of 2% and provide evidence of the housing wealth effect on consumption by combining the fixed effects and IV methods to fix endogeneity issues. Second, we find that credit cards fund consumption growth as house prices increase when home equity loans are not available. This proves the universality of a collateral channel regardless of financial institutions. The implication of our findings is that policy makers should utilize the housing wealth effect to boost and upgrade household consumption when risks and leverage are under control. Future studies could explore administration data from banks to confirm the link between credit card credits and the housing wealth effect. Other funding sources that are popular in China (e.g., private lending) and their impacts on the housing wealth effect could also be an interesting topic.
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