China's One-Child Policy & its Real Estate Bubble

To help their sons get married, the parents of rural surplus men often pour all of their life savings into property, reasoning that a deed will improve their sons’ marriage prospects.

This is true to the extent that in a recent study, Shang-Jin Wei, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia University; Xiaobo Zhang, a professor of economics at Peking University and a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC; and Yu Liu of Tsinghua University found that the intensity of competition in the marriage market in China has considerable consequences for housing value and size.

Specifically, they estimate that 30 to 48 percent of the real-estate appreciation in thirty-five major Chinese cities between 1998 and 2005 (or the equivalent of US $8 trillion), is directly correlated with China’s sex-ratio imbalance and a man’s need to acquire wealth (property) in order to attract a wife.

Wei, Zhang, and Liu arrived at this percentage after examining different regions of China with a significant variation in the gender imbalance for the marriage-age cohort, and discovering that across both rural and urban areas, there is a strong positive association between the local sex ratio and the ratio of home value to household income.

In other words, the more skewed the average sex ratio, the more expensive the average home.

As a control, the researchers looked at rental prices and discovered that they did not appreciate at the same rate as housing prices, adding credence to the idea that the elevated home prices are less indicative of a demand for living space than they are of the need to hold a deed.

They also found that the increased home value is a result of two main factors: people paying a higher price per square meter for their homes, and a trend of buying bigger homes.

'Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World's Next Superpower' by Roseann Lake https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073SFNDQV