Evaluation of Housing Purchase Restriction Policy Based on Natural Experiment: A Perspective from Beijing’s Online Judicial Auction of Houses

To implement a long-term regulation mechanism for the real estate market that differs from city to city, it is necessary to accurately evaluate the effect of the implementation of housing purchase restriction policies. However, the real estate market is highly interconnected and interacts with several socioeconomic fields, the effect of the purchase restriction policy is difficult to be evaluated quantitatively. In this paper, we apply the principles of natural experiments, focus on the unique phenomenon of online judicial auction houses premium in Beijing, and build an analytical framework for the impact of the purchase restriction policy on the commodity housing market. Using the “3–17” housing purchase restriction policy in Beijing (2017) as an exogenous event, we extract the online judicial auction house data from 2014 to 2020 and adopt the “DID model” to quantitatively investigate the mechanism and implementation effect of the housing purchase restriction policy. The results of the study show that the purchase restriction policy has a significant impact on the housing market. The results of the study show that the purchase restriction policy has a relatively mild and non-negligible effect on the house price increase, and can alleviate the pressure of excessive house price increase with a 3.1% restraining effect. On this basis, this paper puts forward corresponding policy recommendations to improve the legal and institutional framework and establish a long-term mechanism to promote the healthy development of the real estate market.