Housing market sentiment and intervention effectiveness: Evidence from China

This paper studies the interaction between housing market sentiment and government interventions. With a unique micro-level data from China, we construct a housing market sentiment index by applying the techniques in the finance literature. This index is significantly correlated with the confidence indexes from official sources. We find that housing market returns increase with contemporaneous sentiment, and high sentiment is followed by low returns. Tightening policies cannot reduce optimism, and high sentiment negatively impacts the effectiveness of tightening policies. This negative impact is especially significant in the zones where housing prices are sensitive to increasing sentiment. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.