Chinese Superstition and Real Estate Prices: Transaction-level Evidence from the US Housing Market

Brad Humphreys, Adam Nowak and Yang Zhou
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Adam Nowak: West Virginia University, Department of Economics
Yang Zhou: West Virginia University, Department of Economics

No 17-18, Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract: We investigate the impact of Chinese superstition on prices paid by Chinese home buyers in Seattle, Washington. Chinese consider 8 lucky and 4 unlucky. Empirical results indicate Chinese buyers pay a 1-2% premium for addresses including an 8 and a 1% discount for addresses including a 4. These results are unrelated to unobserved property quality: no premium exists when Chinese sell to non-Chinese. Absent explicit identifiers for Chinese individuals, we develop a binomial name classifier using methods from the biomedical and document classification literature, allowing for falsification tests using other ethnic groups and mitigating ambiguity attributable to transliteration of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet.

Keywords: Superstition; supervised learning; hedonic price model; name matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 R21 R30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2017-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
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