How rising housing prices affect labor costs in China: Heterogeneity and lagging

Abstract

The impact of house prices rising on urban labor costs has typical heterogeneity and lag effects, but there is little literature on it. Based on the panel data of 283 prefecture level cities from 2001 to 2017, we constructed panel model considering lag effect and threshold effect. The results show that lag one period of housing price has significant positive impact on urban labor costs, with the increase of housing prices, the effect of pushing up the current labor costs is gradually increasing. So, this impact has obvious lag effect and threshold effect. Through grouped regression to test heterogeneity effect, at the regional level, the heterogeneity of the impact is more significant. The more developed the economy is, the greater the pushing effect of house prices on labor costs.