Housing Investment, Stock Market Participation and Household Portfolio choice: Evidence from China's Urban Areas

Abstract: This paper employs the survey data of CHFS (2013) to investigate the impact of housing investment on household stock market participation and portfolio choice. The results show that larger housing investment encourages the household participation in the stock market, but reduces the proportion of their stockholding. The above conclusion remains true even when the endogeneity problem is controlled with risk attitude classification, Heckman model test and subsample regression. This study shows that the growth in the housing market will not lead to stock market development because of lack of household financial literacy and the low expected yield on stock market.