Localized or Regional? Urban Housing Policy Spillover in China’s Urban Agglomerations 2010–2018

Spatio-temporal model and event analysis were integrated in this paper, with 156 prefecture level cities’ housing transaction data and 167 items policies proposed by 10 central cities between January, 2010 and December, 2018 as samples. This paper studied the regional and cross-regional spillover effects of central cities’ urban housing regulation policies to the peripheral cities in the scope of urban agglomerations, as well as the policy-driven interactions of different regional real estate markets. The results indicated that: China’s regional housing market has obvious characteristics of policy orientation, of which the regulation measures on some central cities can affect the residential market and produce certain spillover interference on the market fluctuations of peripheral cities in time and space dimension. When geographical factor was considered, the 10 central cities had different degree of policy spillover effects caused by distinct policy types in their respective urban agglomerations. When ignoring spatial factors, restrictive policies in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhengzhou, Xi’an, Wuhan and Shenzhen had significant cross-regional spillover effects and drove the surrounding housing markets to have geared interactions, which to a certain extent revealed the flowing way of population and wealth in China’s regional economy during the past dozen years.