The effect of housing price on health: new evidence from China

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the effect of housing price on health of China’s urban residents, and further explores the issue of health inequality. We find that the increase of housing price significantly improves people’s physical health, but hurts their mental health, and this effect is affected by residents’ housing wealth. Furthermore, the health inequality related to housing wealth exists in mental health rather than physical health.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing price
• physical health
• mental health
• housing wealth
• health inequality

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• O18
• D10
• I19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See Table A.1 for details.

² China’s data is from the Sixth National Census, the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), and the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). Other countries’ data are from OECD Affordable Housing Database.

³ The data is from Numbeo (https://www.numbeo.com/).

⁴ The data is from the urban rigid demand of house purchase report 2020.

⁵ The data is calculated from the Choice data platform (http://choice.eastmoney.com/).

⁶ The CEInet Statistics Database is an authoritative database that contains rich data of Chinese economic indicators.

⁷ We also conduct two aspects of robustness tests, and the results are shown in the Table A.3 of the Appendix. Thanks for suggestion from the anonymous reviewer.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University Humanities and social science research project of Jiangxi [JJ21230].