Market Sentiments and the Housing Markets

This paper has three chapters. In the first chapter, we develop a measure of housing sentiment for 24 cities in China by parsing through newspaper articles from 2006 to 2017.We find that the sentiment index has strong predictive power for future house prices even after controlling for past price changes and macroeconomic fundamentals. The index leads price movements by nearly 9 months, and it is highly correlated with other survey expectations measures that come with a significant time lag. In the second chapter, we show that short term house price movement is predictable by solely using newspaper and historical price change. In the last chapter, using the sentiment index constructed from newspaper, we got empirical results to show that some people are forward-looking when deciding default and a positive sentiment (anticipated house price appreciation) will lower the Z score of probability of default by 0.028.