The cause of housing market fluctuations in China: An indirect inference perspective

This thesis addresses two main issues related to the housing market in China. It discovers: i) the key driving forces behind the movements of housing price and the evaluation of the model’s capacity in fitting the data. ii) try to identify whether the Chinese housing market can be explained better by using a model with collateral constraint. The Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model including the housing sector and capturing some important features of the Chinese economy is employed to explore the above questions. Moreover, an Indirect Inference method is used to explore these issues in an empirical way. Estimation results show that the estimated model using Indirect Inference method can explain the data behaviour well. The estimated model shows that the capital demand shock plays a significant major role in explaining the housing price dynamic. In terms of the second issue, the Indirect Inference testing results show that the model with collateral constraint cannot provide better performance in explaining the data