Abstract: Since 2002, several policies have been successively enforced by the Chinese government to curb the soaring housing price. Those policies include not only conventional monetary, tax and credit policies, but also administrative interventions with Chinese characteristics: the housing-purchase restriction (HPR) policy since 2010 and the house-sale restrictions (HSR) policy since 2017. The HSR policy, which is currently rarely implemented worldwide, inhibits the speculative transactions in the secondary property market by limiting the resale time of second-hand houses. In view of this, this paper incorporates multiple policy factors into one framework, focusing on the impact of the recently introduced HSR policy and examining the joint effect of HSR policy and HPR policy to complement the existing literature.
With the use of the national monthly data from January 2017 to May 2018, a more applicable multi-stage difference-in-difference model (Multi-Stage DID) is conducted to empirically analyze the effect and heterogeneity of HSR policy on housing price at the national and city levels, respectively. And the joint effect of HSR policy and HPR policy are also conducted. The results show that the HSR policy suppresses housing price and its effects are heterogeneous. At the national level, the effect of HSR policy on second-hand houses price is stronger than that of new houses price, and it is more effective on small-sized houses price than large and medium-sized houses price. At the city level, the impact on properties price in first-tier cities is greater than that in second and third-tier cities, and it has a significant role on housing price in central and western cities, but no significant effect in eastern cities. Moreover, the joint effect of both the HSR policy and HPR policy is superior to that of merely HSR policy.
The policy recommendations are proposed as follows. (a) The policy maker of the HSR policy should continue considering local feature and the risk of economic decline if the HSR policy is introduced indiscriminately across the country. (b) During the enforcement of HSR policy, the effective supply of housing should be improved by structural reform at supply-side in the primary market. Policies such as public housing and the welfare-oriented housing will alleviate the structural imbalances between supply and demand in the market.

Key words: house-sale restrictions, housing price, multi-stage DID, housing-purchase restriction, joint effect