Farewell Victoria: Quantifying the Value of Foreign Names

Zhaowen Guo, Political Science and Chenyue Cao, Public Policy

This study investigates the impact of foreign names on residential property prices in the Chinese housing market. We analyze a unique web-scraped dataset of 900,000 residential communities and use both dictionary-based and machine learning-based methods to identify foreign-named properties. Our findings reveal that properties with foreign names command a price premium of up to 11% compared to those without. In addition, we examine the heterogeneous effects of foreign names on housing prices across different subgroups using hedonic price regressions, unconditional quantile hedonic price regressions, and geographically weighted regressions. Our results suggest that individuals with lower socioeconomic status and limited exposure to foreign cultures tend to engage in conspicuous consumption, paying a premium to live in a foreign-named property.