Conference Agenda

In this paper, we examine whether the housing consumption of home buyers is influenced by wealth transfers from parents in a context without a down payment binding for a home purchase. We use the 2018 wave of nationwide housing surveys in the Netherlands. Our empirical results show that wealth transfers from parents increase housing consumption in house value, house size, and house value per square meter. We then find a correlation between wealth transfer and housing preferences, whereby younger households tend to prioritize larger size than house value per square meter, whereas older households demonstrate the opposite tendency.

The "equal rights for renting and purchasing" policy aims to promote the development of the rental housing market by granting equal rights to lessees and homebuyers in terms of access to surrounding public services, such as education resources, and safeguarding the rights and interests of rental housing tenants. This is intended to stabilize the expectations of renters, promote the demand for rental housing, and further develop China's rental housing market. Based on the analysis of supply and demand in the real estate market and an analysis of housing rental and purchase behavior, this article constructs a multi-period difference-in-differences model based on monthly housing price data for large and medium-sized cities in China from 2015 to 2020 to analyze the impact of the "equal rights for renting and purchasing" policy on housing prices in China's large and medium-sized cities and its heterogeneity, and to test the effectiveness of the policy. The results show that the implementation of the "equal rights for renting and purchasing" policy can significantly suppress the rise in housing prices and has a restraining effect on housing prices of different sizes and attributes. Among them, small and medium-sized housing units in newly-built commercial housing and large-sized housing units in second-hand housing are most resistant to the policy impact, while medium-sized and small-sized housing units in newly-built commercial housing and second-hand housing are most strongly affected by the policy. Overall, the "equal rights for renting and purchasing" policy has achieved positive results since its implementation and has played a certain role in restraining housing prices in China's large and medium-sized cities.

This paper examines the impact of anticipated wealth transfers on recipient’s wealth accumulation behavior. Our empirical analysis based on the doubly-robust, augmented inverse probability weighting estimator shows that anticipated transfers from parents would encourage children to save more and accumulate larger amount of housing asset. Anticipated transfers can also change children’s intention to leave their wealth to the offspring. It is found that households with anticipated transfers from parents tend to have stronger intention to leave their wealth to offspring, and thereby accumulate larger amounts of wealth to meet their gifts and bequest needs.

This paper examines whether household decisions are influenced by the experience shared by others in their social network, by investigating the effects of parental housing experience on their children’s homeownership decision. We use nationwide administrative data from the Netherlands and find that a one percentage point increase in the parent’s annualized cumulative return leads to a 0.1 percentage point increase in the probability of an initially renting child becoming a homeowner. This intergenerational dependence could be explained by the effects of parental experience on expectation formation of children, while intergenerational wealth transfer is unlikely to play a role.