As the Chinese economy continues to transform, housing wealth has gradually become the single largest asset in most urban households. At the same time, housing wealth inequality has worsened, and housing stratification has become a major form of social stratification in the country. However, there is no empirical evidence of temporal changes in housing wealth inequality and their implications on social stratification. Pooling three waves of survey data from the 1995, 2008, and 2013 iterations of the Chinese Household Income Project, we present a dynamic image of housing wealth inequality in urban China. The results suggest that housing wealth inequality decreased initially and increased later. To further illustrate how housing wealth is stratified by social groups, we conducted regression analyses and structural tests, which revealed three main results: the education level of the household head has an increasingly positive impact on housing wealth inequality; a household head with superior occupational status generally has an advantage in terms of possession of housing wealth with no evidence that this advantage diminishes during the transitional period; and income has a significant, positive impact on housing wealth, and this effect exhibited an increasing trend over time. These results imply that the temporal changes in housing wealth inequality exacerbated the social stratification in transitional urban China. Highlights

As a new model of urban governance with Chinese characteristics, the national honored cities from city evaluation competitions, represented by the “National Civilized City” campaign, has always been popular among Chinese cities. Can the honored cities of the campaigns achieve sustainable development, and how? Based on the five concepts of sustainable development, which are innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing, this study sets up a comprehensive index to measure the sustainability of the growth of a city. Then, the data of 242 Chinese cities from 2011 to 2019 and the difference-in-differences (DID) approach are used to evaluate the impacts of the Civilized City honored in the campaigns on the sustainability of growth. The results show that: (1) the “Civilized City” honor promotes sustainable development in Chinese cities; (2) the mechanism analysis shows that the “Civilized City” honor contributes to the sustainability of growth by effectively promoting the level of industrial agglomeration in cities; (3) further heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect of the “Civilized City” honor on the sustainability of growth varies by city size, the administrative level and the location of the city. By providing the evidence of economic effects of the “Civilized City” honor, this research rationalizes the city campaigns run by the Chinese government and provides important enlightenment for the continuous improvement of the selection mechanism of the national honored cities to promote sustainable development.

Although there is a consensus that the housing market is deeply affected by credit policies, little research is available on the impact of credit policies on housing market liquidity. Moreover, housing market liquidity is not scientifically quantified and monitored in China. To improve the government’s intelligence in monitoring the fluctuation of the housing market and make more efficient policies in time, the dynamic relationship between credit policy and housing liquidity needs to be understood fully. On the basis of second-hand housing transaction data in Beijing from 2013 to 2018, this paper uses a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive model and reveals several important results. First, loosening credit policies improves the housing market liquidity, whereas credit tightening reduces the housing market liquidity. Second, both the direction and the duration of the impacts are time-varying and sensitive to the market conditions; when the housing market is downward, the effect of a loose credit policy to improve market liquidity is weak, and when the housing market is upward, market liquidity is more sensitive to monetary policy. Finally, the housing market confidence serves as an intermediary between credit policy and housing market liquidity. These results are of great significance to improve the intelligence and efficiency of the government in monitoring and regulating the housing market. Several policy recommendations are discussed to regulate the housing market and to stabilize market expectations.

The ability of the cross-city commuting labor force to obtain housing has a profound impact on the development of the housing market and the enhancement of social welfare, but whether cross-city commuting has facilitated housing purchases remains to be verified However, the research on whether cross-city commuting behavior promotes labor force housing purchase in metropolitan areas is still lacking, especially in China, where the culture of buying houses is relatively special. This article used field survey data from the 2023 China Metropolitan Area Occupation and Housing Status Sampling Survey to empirically analyze whether cross-city commuting has facilitated housing purchases within metropolitan areas. The analysis was conducted by constructing a baseline model, a mediation effect model, and a subsample regression model. The results show that the cross-city commuting facilitated housing purchase within metropolitan areas, and the location preference is to purchase a house with a distance of 20–40 km from the workplace, but the contribution of the cross-city commuting to multi-suite purchases is relatively low. Mechanism analysis shows that compared to the workers who work and live in peripheral areas or the workers who work and live in cores, intercity commuters are promoted to purchase housing by relatively higher income and inducement of the housing price gap. The above conclusions still hold after controlling potential endogeneity issues and in robustness tests. The research of this paper can provide a new perspective for alleviating the housing inequality in the metropolitan area.