Understanding Changes in the Distribution of House Prices in Beijing, China
Abstract
This thesis provides some evidences in understanding house price in Beijing. The rst
part examines appreciation rate of house price across the distribution from 2013 to 2015.
Similar temporal patterns of appreciation for different parts of price distribution are shown,
while the rates of appreciation of low-priced homes are found to be higher than higher-priced
homes over almost the full research period.
The second part analyzes changes in the distribution of house price between 2012
and 2015. We disentangle temporal changes into a composition effect attributed to altered
house characteristics and a coefficient effect driven by varying regression coefficients. Mean
decomposition suggests that only 13% of average price gaps are attributed to the composition
effect. Quantile decomposition results indicate that the contribution of the composition effect
rises monotonously from the left tail of distribution to the right tail while the contribution
of the coefficient effect only shows slight variation.