Housing purchase intention of the floating population under the home purchase restriction policy in China

AbstractHousing security is fundamental to the life of rural-urban migrants in cities, and the housing choices of rural-urban migrants have drawn increasing attention in recent studies. However, the role of housing policies is still yet to be explored. This paper aims to investigate the effect of housing policies on rural-urban migrants’ purchasing intention. Taking China as an example, the empirical results indicate that, somewhat surprisingly, the home purchase restriction policy implemented by the Chinese government raises the floating population’s intention to purchase houses in the host city. Yet, such a linkage varies with income and housing status among the floating population, while it gives rise to changes in their consumption behaviors. This study thus provides new insights into the effect of housing policies and how floating populations make housing purchase decisions, yielding critical implications on how to optimize housing policies.Keywords: Housing purchase intentionfloating populationhome purchase restriction policyChina Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1 Source: http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/zxfb/202004/t20200430_1742724.html2 The Chinese government has implemented two rounds of the HPR policy: the first round is from 2010 to 2014, which has been detailed above; the second round is from 2016 to now. As to the CMDS data, the 2013, 2014, and 2016 waves of this data have exposed related information on the housing purchase intention of the floating population. However, regarding that: 1) the CMDS is usually conducted in the first half of the year, while the second round of the HPR policy was mostly adopted by cities in the second half of 2016, and 2) few cities have remained the HPR policy in 2015 and the background of implementing the HPR policy since 2016 may have subtle differences to the first round, including the 2016 CMDS data may lead to bias to our analysis. Thus, we focus on the first round of the HPR policy and choose the 2013 and 2014 waves of CMDS data in the empirical analysis.3 The detailed information of the purchase restriction policies introduced by sample cities is shown in Appendix 1.Additional informationFundingThis study was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72004199 & No. 71874156) and Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (No. LQ21G030012).