Regional spillover and rising connectedness in China’s urban housing prices

Abstract

Regional housing prices may be dynamically linked and converge to a long-run equilibrium. The level of connectedness can be used to describe systemic risk in the housing market. This paper uses a recently developed vector autoregressive-based time-series approach to focus on the short-run dynamics in urban housing prices in China. The empirical results show that housing prices across cities have increasingly connected and consequentially associated with higher systemic risk. The empirical results are consistent with the implications of an information spillover mechanism documented in the recent literature.