Abstract: The rising housing prices have dual effects on household consumption, which are wealth effect and crowding-out effect. This paper conducts an empirical analysis by making use of the data of China’s 30 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) during the period of 2000-2015. The results show that the rise of housing prices can restrain the growth of consumption demand, but the rising prices of different real estate types have different crowding-out effect on consumption demand. The crowding-out effects on consumption in the order from higher to lower price rising are as following: residential commercial housing, commercial housing, office commercial housing and industrial commercial housing. Further study takes the housing-price-to-income ratio to measure the bubble degree, which is also used as the threshold variable, so as to study its impact on the crowding-out effect. The results show that no matter the housing-price-to-income ratio is higher or lower, the rise of housing prices would restrain the consumption growth. However, the crowding-out effect of rising housing prices on consumption has a significant threshold effect on both sides of the housing-price-to-income ratio when it is 6.607, and the crowding-out effect will be much stronger once the threshold value is overtaken.

Key words: rise of housing prices rise; bubble degree; consumption; crowding-out effect; threshold effect