Home-Purchase Restriction, Urban Population, and Industry Development: Evidence from Beijing

With the rapid economic development, megacities have gathered a large number of population and industries, and a series of “urban diseases” have also emerged. To alleviate these problems, various administrative measures have been taken to control population and optimize industrial distribution. Meanwhile, home-purchase restriction (HPR) has been introduced to control the soaring housing prices. Existing research focuses on the impact of policy on its own market, without paying attention to the linkage between markets and spillover effect. We take Beijing, the capital of China, as an example to study the impact of the HPR on the population distribution and industry development of megacities. By analyzing the industry location quotient and population economy matching degree, we conclude that HPR effectively promotes the efficiency of population and industry dispersal, but increases the mismatching between industry and population. City is a typical intelligent system that gathers various intelligent agents, and the development of its population and industry is the fundamental evolution of the system. This paper explores the role of policies in the evolution of urban intelligent systems, and therefore has important theoretical and practical significance for intelligent systems.