Home value misestimation and household behavior: Evidence from China
Nan Gao and
Pinghan Liang
China Economic Review, 2019, vol. 55, issue C, 168-180
Abstract:
Households often make errors when self-assessing their housing wealth. By using the Chinese Households Finance Survey, we show that Chinese urban households systematically overestimate their home value. This bias is significantly related to household consumption: a one standard deviation increase in the extent of estimation bias is associated with a 10% increase in household consumption. Our main results are robust against a variety of robustness checks, e.g., taking into account the expectations of future home price, using the interviewee's estimation as the instrumental variable for the household self-estimation, implementing the hedonic model on an external data source to assess real homevalue, etc.. Further, we show that overestimated households are more likely to take risk in financial market, and have a larger amount of immediate and conspicuous consumption. These findings have policy implications for the recent debate about property tax, indicating the unintended consequences of property tax through providing more precise information about home value.
Keywords: Consumption; House value; Misestimation; Household decision making; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 D31 E20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X19300483
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:55:y:2019:i:c:p:168-180
DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2019.04.003
Access Statistics for this article
China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu
More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().