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| Borrowing Constraints and Household Consumption: From the Perspective of the Running Liquidity of China's Housing Provident Fund |
| KANG Shulong, WANG Xiaoting, YU Haiyue
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| School of Finance, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics |
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Abstract The Housing Provident Fund (HPF) is an important institutional arrangement for providing housing to citizens. The efficient operation of the HPF system is important for implementing the strategic position that “houses are for living in, not for speculation”, improving residents' housing security, and enhancing people's sense of gain. However, narrow financing channels increase the pressure on the HPF’s liquidity as the HPF’s loan-to-deposit ratio rises. This restricts the HPF’s ability to meet households' credit demand for purchasing housing. HPF management agencies reduce credit risk and liquidity pressure by reducing loan amounts, increasing the down payment ratio for existing housing, and strictly controlling housing appraisal values and loan terms. All of this leads to a higher threshold for HPF loans than for commercial loans. In this context, it is necessary to study the factors and mechanisms that restrict the operational efficiency of the HPF system, which is crucial for reforming the HPF system, ensuring safe housing for citizens, and promoting high-quality economic development.
To this end, this paper first discusses how the HPF influences households' borrowing behavior and consumption under liquidity pressure by constructing a theoretical model, and then uses data from the 2013 and 2017 China Household Finance Surveys (CHFS) to construct a pooled cross-sectional regression model and empirically test the theoretical hypotheses. To correct for the estimation bias caused by omitted variables, we also use control dummy variables for the observation year, loan issue year, and regions, and further run a propensity score matching (PSM) model and two-stage least squares regression to alleviate endogeneity issues to identify the impact of borrowing constraints on the choice of housing loan, and the effect of the housing loan on the down payment ratio and participants' consumption. Research shows that, first, borrowing constraints decrease the probability of HPF participants using HPF loans by 33.85%. Second, liquidity pressure explains why HPF management agencies raise the application threshold for HPF loans, which reduces the probability of borrowing-constrained households getting HPF loans. On average, the down payment ratio of HPF loans is about 5% higher than that of commercial loans, and provinces with high HPF loan-to-deposit ratios have higher down payment requirements. Finally, households without HPF loans have an increased housing purchase burden, and their consumption of non-durable goods is significantly reduced. Households with HPF loans consume 10.83% more non-durable goods than households with commercial loans.
Our contributions to the literature are as follows. First, we use the perspective of the HPF system design to discuss the reasons for the system's inefficiency. Second, we use household-level microdata to identify the impact of liquidity pressure on the borrowing behavior of borrowing-constrained households. Finally, we focus on the difference between the effects of liquidity pressure on the borrowing behavior and consumption of HPF participants with different characteristics, avoiding the bias caused by the systematic difference between HPF participants and non-participants. It would be helpful to better evaluate the implementation efficiency of the HPF system.
We suggest that HPF management agencies should enhance their liquidity by revitalizing their existing credit assets. Reforming the HPF financing pattern will help decrease the threshold for HPF loans and increase the likelihood of participants obtaining HPF loans, which will help to promote fairness, reduce participants' burden, and boost consumption. In addition, it can provide investment products with high credit ratings for the capital market and alleviate the asset shortage caused by insufficient high-quality assets in the financial market. Moreover, the reform can provide liquidity support to companies to reduce their fees and burden. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, the reform can assist with the practical implementation of policies aimed at reducing the fees and burden of companies against HPF operational payments that are unbalanced due to the decline in HPF income during the fee reduction period. Consistent with the idea of “houses are for living in, not for speculation”, the reform can also help to ensure that the housing demand of low-and middle-income households is met, to fulfill the HPF’s role of improving housing security and ensuring the stable development of the property sector.
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Received: 22 September 2020
Published: 25 April 2022
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