Cultural Superstitions and Residential Real Estate Prices: Transaction-Level Evidence from the US Housing Market

Abstract

In Chinese culture, the number 8 is considered lucky and 4 is considered unlucky. We analyze the relationship between the presence of 8 s and 4 s in addresses and transaction prices paid by Chinese home buyers and sellers in a novel setting, Seattle, Washington, from 1990 to 2015. In the absence of explicit identifiers for Chinese individuals, we develop a probabilistic model for identifying ethnicity based on name alone. The results indicate Chinese buyers pay a 1-2% premium for addresses that include an 8 and 1% less for properties with a 4 in the address. These results are not related to unobserved property quality as there is no premium when Chinese sell properties with an 8 in the address. These results suggest that some Chinese home buyers in Seattle retain their Chinese cultural superstitions.

Homeowner preferences after September 11th, a microdata approach

“…Moreover, examples where the researcher generates names from a given ethnicity are common in correspondence experiments in economics, Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004), Ahmed and Hammarstedt (2008), Bosch et al (2010), Hanson and Hawley (2011), Hanson et al (2016). Applications where real names are used to infer ethnicity include Humphreys et al (2016) and Gautier et al (2009).…”