Abstract

In China’s regulated housing markets, a married couple may choose strategically to divorce in order to purchase more houses and/or purchase with more favorable financial conditions. Our study examines the propensity for strategic divorce induced by housing market regulations in China. To overcome the difficulty of using conventional divorce data to distinguish between a “true” divorce and a strategic (or a “fake”) divorce, we design an identification strategy using data on internet searches for divorce- and marriage-related keywords in 32 Chinese major cities from 2009 through 2016. Our difference-in-differences estimates provide robust evidence that housing market regulations significantly increase the propensity for strategic divorce. Our results also show that the increase in the propensity for strategic divorce is weaker in cities with higher male–female ratios and with stronger Confucian ideologies. These findings point to the role that housing market regulations play in distorting a family’s choices, as well as to the importance for policymakers to consider unintended impacts of regulations.

内容提要

中国的房地产市场调控政策可能使得夫妻通过离婚来获得更有利的购房条件。本文检验了中国房地产市场调控政策所导致的策略型离婚倾向。通过采用2009-2016年32个主要城市离婚和婚姻相关词语的网络搜索数据，本文区分出真实的离婚和策略型离婚。双重差分的结果显示，房地产市场调控政策显著提高了策略型离婚倾向；在男女比例越高、受儒家思想影响更大的城市策略型离婚倾向增长越少。这些发现证实了房地产市场调控政策给家庭选择带来的预期之外的影响。

论文链接：https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-021-00853-2

本文在线发表于Journal of Population Economics2021年第4期。该期刊为hbs04红宝石线路B+类奖励期刊，作者按姓氏字母排序。