Title: Housing Wealth Shocks and Fertility Choice: Evidence from China

Speaker: Liu Hong

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of housing wealth on fertility decisions by exploiting housing wealth variation supplied by the recent housing boom in China.  Using data from the CFPS 2010–2016, we find that for a 100,000 yuan increase in lagged home values, the likelihood that home-owning women give a birth falls by 5.8%. We also show that an increase housing wealth leads to a reduction in total fertility rate and that the fertility decisions of women who have higher household income, more education, no siblings, and live in urban areas are more responsive to housing wealth growth. We further investigate the underlying mechanisms and the results are consistent with our hypotheses about the living cost effect and old-age security effect of house price increase. These findings have important policy implication given the low fertility rate in China.

Liu Hong：Liu Hong graduated from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2007 with a Ph.D. in Economics. Since 2007, she has been engaged in research and teaching at the China University of Economics and Management, Central University of Finance and Economics. She is currently a Distinguished Professor and Doctoral Supervisor of Longma Scholar. Her main research areas include health economics, labor economics and development economics. She published many English papers in international academic journals such as Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of Population Economics, Health Economics; published Chinese in Economic Research, Economics Quarterly, and World Economy; 2 national self-finance fund projects and 2 vertical projects of the Ministry of Education. In 2012, she was selected as the New Century Excellent Talent Support Program of the Ministry of Education.

Date: April 18th, Thursday, 2019

Time: 14:00-15:15PM

Location: Room 608, Academic Hall, CUFE