Intermediaries play an important role in markets with asymmetric information by reducing the search friction and uncertainty for buyers and sellers. However, when a conflict of interest arises, agents may not fully act on behalf of their clients. Using a unique dataset of both housing resale...

Many efforts have been made to measure investor sentiment in financial markets, but only a few studies focus on housing markets. We build sentiment indexes for the Chinese housing market while observing that house price narratives are abundantly documented on social media. With the help of...

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...

High and rising prices in Chinese housing markets have attracted global attention, as well as the interest of the Chinese government and its regulators. Housing markets look very risky based on the stylized facts we document. Price-to-rent ratios in Beijing and seven other large markets across...