The Impact Of Owned Housing On The Well - Being Of Urban Residents In China: Mechanism Analysis And Empirical Study Based On Micro - Data

Under the background of rapid increase of housing prices in recent years, housing problems have become more important factors affecting macroeconomy and people’s livelihood. So it is worth paying more attention to the project that whether the subjective happiness levels of urban residents will be significantly influenced by homeownership and through what mechanism will homeownership affect happiness. This paper starts with the nature of homeownership, and tries to use fixed residence feature and asset feature of self-owned housing to analyse the impact of homeownership on subjective happiness levels. Then, we set up a two-stage utility function under the theory of Life Cycle Hypothesis to further figure out housing factors which will affect subjective happiness levels. Last, we use the database of Chinese General Social Survey 2005 to complete empirical research, and find out that 1) Homeownership significantly promotes subjective happiness level of Chinese urban residents.2) Homeownership still positively affects subjective happiness level after controled its influence to the residents’non-housing consumption.3) For residents who have their own housing, the relative proportion of housing value to total income will have negative effect on their subjective happiness levels.4) The growth rates of house price influence residents’subjective happiness levels. Growing housing price significantly promotes subjective happiness of house owners, but on the other hands, decreases subjective happiness level of residents who have no self-owned housing.