Property prices and bank lending in China

This paper investigates the relationship between property prices and bank lending for the case of China over the period 1999Q1-2006Q2. Under a high dimensional autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework with gross domestic product (GDP) and interest rate also being taken into account, we find that there exists unidirectional causality running from bank lending to property prices, and that the causality runs interactively through the error correction term from bank lending, GDP and interest rate to property prices. Our findings have important policy implications. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.