The “Spindle” Effect of Guarantee Function of the Housing Provident Fund System：An Empirical Study Based on CHFS Data

As a mutual aid, welfare, and compulsory system, the housing provident fund (HPF) is designed to promote housing equity and ensure that workers have houses to live in. Since its implementation, it has played an important role in improving the housing consumption of urban residents, and has had a positive impact on promoting the reform of the housing system and the healthy development of housing finance. However, in recent years, with the housing prices in major cities have sky rocketed, the real estate market has increasingly shown irrational prosperity, and the effectiveness and fairness of HPF have gradually been questioned. Can the HPF continue to play its due role? Can it support the housing consumption of low-income people? Until now, there is no consistent conclusion on these issues.This paper uses the panel data of the 2013 and 2015 China Household Finance Survey(CHFS) to analyze the impact of HPF on household housing consumption and group heterogeneity, and innovatively introduces the minimum wage as an instrumental variable to further solve the endogenous problem. The study finds that HPF has a positive impact on residential housing ownership and planned housing purchases. Since the current endogenous problem of the provident fund contribution variables has not been well resolved, this paper carries out a large amount of data collection, introduces the minimum wage as an instrumental variable, and uses the instrumental variable method for regression analysis to reduce estimation errors. The results show that the direction and significance is highly consistent with the basic regression results. The provident fund contribution for low-income families has a significant positive impact on housing ownership, but the impact on the housing purchase plan is not significant. The contribution of the provident fund of middle-income families has a significant positive impact on the housing ownership and purchase plan, while the contribution of the provident fund of high-income families has no significant effect on the housing ownership and purchase plan. It can be seen that the provident fund plays the most important role in supporting the housing consumption of middle-income families. There is a certain degree of “spindle” effect of “subsidy between the two ends”, and there is neither “robbing the rich to help the poor” nor “robbing the poor to help the rich”. The HPF is an important institutional arrangement to solve the problem of people’s housing and its original intention is to provide a guarantee and allow more people to enjoy the benefits of the housing system. However, at this stage, more support for housing consumption for low-income groups should be considered to ensure the fairness and effectiveness.