How Does Aging Affect Housing Prices?—The Empirical Evidence from Asian Emerging Markets

The 21st century is a century that the world is aging. As the engine machine of global world development, Asian emerging markets are going through the population aging process while rapidly developing economics. The aging will bring rather serious changes to economic and social development. Housing, an essential need of human beings, is controlled by market rules and inevitably influenced by economic fluctuation. Therefore, what kind of impact will population aging have on Asian real estate markets? How does it affect the house price? Those are the concentrations of this paper. Based on the literature research, this paper discovers a correlativity between aging and housing prices, then we deduce an empirical model according to supply and demand theory, life cycle hypothesis, and overlapping generations model; at last, we make transnational empirical tests taking 5 Asian emerging markets with the serious population aging issue, namely China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand. The conclusions are that the rising old dependency rate will lead to a negative impact on housing prices while the decline of the youth dependency rate will bring a positive impact on them. GDP is one of the most important factors that push house prices. The tests in those 5 Asian markets verify the results of the theoretical model