The speculative nature of both stock and housing markets in China has attracted the attention of observers. However, while stock market data are easily available, the low frequency and low quality of publicly available housing price data hampers the study of the relationship between the two...

We provide an innovative measure of information flow in Chinese housing markets based on search records from the Internet search engine Google. The measure depicts a substantial flow of house-price related information from national "superstar" cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, and regional...