Mapping China’s time-varying house price landscape

The recent increase in China’s house prices at the national level masks tremendous variation at the city level – a feature largely overlooked in the macroprudential literature. This paper measures the evolving heterogeneity in China’s house price dynamics across 70 major cities and assesses its relationship with housing market characteristics. We gauge the heterogeneity of house price dynamics using a novel regime-switching modelling approach to estimate the time-varying patterns of China’s city-level housing price synchronization. The estimates indicate an increasing synchronization leading up to 2015, and a decoupling pattern thereafter, which is associated to the heterogeneous strength of regional macroprudential policies. After sorting city-level housing prices into four clusters sharing similar cyclical features, we document high synchronization within clusters, but low synchronization among them. The empirical evidence suggests that differentials in the growth of population, income, and air quality are relevant explanatory factors of housing price synchronization among cities.