Homevalue misestimation and household leverage: An empirical study of Chinese urban households

Households often make errors in assessing homevalue. By merging representative Chinese urban household survey data with web-scraped housing price data, we estimate a hedonic model to assess the real value of homes and calculate the extent of homevalue misestimation. We show that homevalue misestimation is significantly related to household leverage: a 10% increase in the extent of homevalue misestimation is associated with a 1.88 percentage increase in household leverage, in terms of debt-to-income ratios. Moreover, both formal and informal borrowing are increasing with respect to homevalue misestimation. A variety of robustness checks and heterogeneity analyses further support our main results. The correlation between misestimation and leverage is even larger for households who underestimate their homevalue. It's demonstrated that the lack of housing market information and endowment effect both contribute to misestimation. However, there is no evidence that overconfidence, risk attitude, or anchoring effect significantly affect misestimation. These findings have policy implications for the recent debate on property taxes, indicating the unexpected consequences of property taxes by providing more precise information on homevalue.