Understanding changes in the distribution of house prices in Beijing, China

This thesis provides some evidence in understanding house price in Beijing. The first 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.