Authors: Wong Woei Chyuan, Khairul Zharif Zaharudin, Helen X. H. Bao
Year: 2026
Status: Work in Progress
PDF: Available upon request — hxb20@cam.ac.uk
Research line: Exclusion and spatial inequality in housing markets
Abstract
(To be filled when conceptual framework stabilises. Provisional: a rare Malaysian administrative dataset records buyer AND seller names on each housing transaction, with longitudinal linkage across years. We use these features to test three claims grounded in identity-economics: (1) same-ethnicity buyer-seller dyads occur above the chance baseline implied by location and property characteristics; (2) the 16 dyad-ethnicity cells exhibit systematic pricing differentials conditional on observables; (3) the Malay-Chinese pricing asymmetry reverses across Malay-majority vs Chinese-economic-dominance districts — same identities, opposite mechanism direction conditional on host context. The paper extends Bikmetova et al. (2023) US sales-market dyad evidence to a non-US multi-ethnic post-colonial setting, and complements Wang et al. (2026) Malaysian rental-market evidence at the dyad level.)