Value of qualification to buy a house: Evidence from the housing purchase restriction policy in China

China's housing purchase restriction (HPR) policy imposes administrative restrictions on households' home purchase eligibility to curb speculative demand. We quantify households' willingness to pay (WTP) to re-acquire such eligibility. The empirical results based on the staggered DID specification suggest that when local governments implement the HPR policy, the transaction prices of judicial housing auctions legally exempted from HPR increase by 18.91 %. This HPR-exempted qualification premium can be converted to an estimate of 22.48 % of the transaction price as buyers' WTP for home purchase eligibility. The heterogeneity analysis also suggests that the WTP significantly increases when speculative incentives are stronger in the housing market. If policymakers in mainland China consider replacing the HPR policy with an additional buyer transaction tax like that in Singapore and Hong Kong, China, the WTP estimates can serve as the benchmark in setting the tax rate. •Estimating homebuyers' willingness to pay for home purchase eligibility•A new method to evaluate the housing purchase restriction policy in China•Supporting the design of the additional buyer transaction tax