Description:
Using newly published house price data for a panel of countries from 1870 to 2012, we empirically identify the surge in house prices as a factor partly responsible for the global fertility transition. A variety of approaches— including fixed effects estimations, dynamic panel estimations, instrumental variables estimations, and machine learning methods—reassuringly show that surging house prices discourage fertility; the effect size ranges between -0.01 and -0.03 fewer births per woman with a 10 percent increase in real house prices. The effect of house prices since the second half of the twentieth century is comparable to that of concurrent female education increases. This paper contributes to the extensive literature on fertility, pointing to the role of increased housing costs in the global fertility transition