Can Volume be More Informative than Prices? Evidence from Chinese Housing Markets

This paper examines pairwise intercity price-volume dynamics in China using novel daily transaction prices and volume dataset from 32 Chinese cities. Despite geographical disparity and time variations, the volume-volume dynamic relationship plays a noticeably more significant role than price-price or price-volume relationships, suggesting that volume may be more informative than prices in China’s pairwise intercity housing market spillovers. We further propose a new index to summarize both price and volume information and better measure such spillovers. We find that the index can be significantly explained by economic fundamentals, which attests to the soundness of the basic finding