Resource Opportunity in China’s Market Transition and Governance: Time Factor in Urban Housing Inequality

Since China’s reform and opening up, the country’s rapid marketization process has been accompanied by the rapid growth of inequality, which has been significant for all classes of society. In terms of its impact, housing inequality is particularly noticeable. In this paper, we discuss the influence of real-estate purchase time, organization, human capital, and political capital on the value of real estate and the appreciation of real estate in China by using a conditional mean model and a quantile regression model. The differences in the degree of influence of these factors on different quantile levels are also investigated. We found that, after adding the time factor, the prior possession of resources in the early stage of market transformation will benefit the long-term marketization process. Organizations that can penetrate “market-redistribution” and professions that directly participate in the distribution of real-estate resources also have significant advantages in this regard.