补偿性购房动机:持续改善的高等教育性别比与房价上涨

The Motive of Compensatory House-Purchase:Continuous Improvement in the Sex Ratio of Higher Education and the Rise of Housing Prices

文章基于Becker的婚姻理论提出了一个新的购房动机,即把中国持续改善的高等教育性别比与房价上涨联系起来,为男性持续增大的购房压力提供了理论解释。文章认为,由于婚姻收益分配机制的不灵活,男性与女性在婚前的讨价还价能力和婚后的婚姻收益分配不一致,随着高等教育性别比例(女/男)的持续改善,在婚姻匹配中男性会通过购房对女性教育水平的提高进行补偿。家庭层面的数据以及省级层面的数据支持了本文提出的假说。家庭层面的回归结果显示,妻子相对教育水平越高的家庭越有可能购房而不是租房;在省级面板回归中,文章使用抽样调查中大专以上女性数量与男性数量之比来衡量高等教育性别比,结果显示,高等教育性别比提高越快房价上涨越快。综上,现有文献忽视了婚姻市场中出现的一个重要现象,即:适婚女性不仅相对数量在减少,其相对质量也在大幅提高,文章以此为切入点拓展了婚姻市场影响房价的研究文献。

In recent years,a very important phenomenon has emerged in the marriage market,which is the change of the sex ratio of higher education(manifested as the significant improvement of women’s education compared with men’s education).This paper uses micro survey data and pro-vincial panel data to investigate the relationship between this phenomenon and the rise of housing prices comprehensively.It attempts to answer the following two questions:(1)How does the change of the sex ratio of higher education affect residents’house-purchase behavior?(2)Does the micro motive caused by the change of the sex ratio of higher education promote the rise of housing prices at the macro level? Based on the marriage theory of Becker,this paper puts forward a new motive of house-purchase,which provides a theoretical explanation for the increasing pressure of men of house-purchase and links the sex ratio of higher education to the rise of housing prices in China.The main logic of this paper is that,because of the mechanism inflexibility of the marriage income distribution,the bargaining power of men and women before marriage is not consistent with the income distribution after marriage.With the continuous improvement of the sex ratio of higher education(women/men),men will compensate for the improvement of women’s education level by buying a house in the marriage matching.Family-level data and provincial-level data confirm this hypothesis.Family-level results show that households with wives of higher education are more likely to buy houses than to rent.In the provincial panel regression,the ratio of females above junior college to males is used to measure the sex ratio of higher education,and the results show that the faster the sex ratio of higher education increases,the faster the housing price rises.This paper expands the research on the influence of the marriage market on housing prices.Existing research ignores this important phenomenon in the marriage market,that is,the number of marriageable women is decreasing relatively,and their quality is also greatly improving relatively.This paper has important theoretical significance.The hypothesis proposed in this paper complements the research of Wei et al.(2012),and does not have a major defect in their paper,that is,the imbalance of the sex ratio of marriageable population mainly occurs in economically backward regions,while the rise of housing prices mainly occurs in economically developed regions.The compensatory effect caused by the sex ratio of higher education and the tournament effect caused by the imbalance of the sex ratio of marriageable population jointly affect the house-purchase pressure of men,if we only emphasize the tournament effect caused by the imbalance of the sex ratio of marriageable population,we cannot explain many other phenomena.Moreover,this paper has important practical significance.The spread of the public opinion that"mother-inlaws drives up housing prices"illustrates that buying a house for marriage in China is the most important motive of house-purchase,hence this paper points out that the government should weaken the influence of the compensatory house-purchase motive on housing prices through many measures,such as guiding the public opinion.