经济学研究中的房价工具变量应用与有效性讨论

Discussion on the Application and Validity of HousePrice Instrumental Variables in Economics Research

准确识别经济变量之间的因果关系是实证研究的核心问题。本文基于对现有文献的研究,首先系统评述了几种常用的房价工具变量的经济学逻辑及有效性。在此基础上,本文详细介绍了目前学术界比较前沿的两类工具变量——土地供给弹性和房价结构变化率的计算方法,并利用中国城市层面的数据进行了测算,结果发现上述两个指标与中国城市的现实情况非常契合,且与房价增长率之间存在高度相关性。本文关于房价工具变量的讨论对于后续研究中更好地解决房价与其他经济变量的内生性问题,提高中国房地产研究问题的科学性具有重要的借鉴意义。

Accurate identification of causal relationships among economic variables is a core issue in empirical research.Based on research with the existing document literature,firstly this paper reviews systematically the economics logic and validity of several commonly used house price instrumental variables.Then this paper introduces in detail the computation methods of two types of instrumental variables,land supply elasticity and the rate of change in housing price structure,which are currently at the forefront of academia.The computation were completed with some city-level data in China.It is found that the above two indicators fit well with the reality in China's cities and are highly correlated with house price growth rate.The discussion on housing price instrument variables in this paper has important reference significance to better solve the endogenous problem of housing price and other economic variables in the subsequent researches and improve the scientific nature of real estate research in China.