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作者

Xiandeng Jiang1, Zheng Pan2 & Ningru Zhao 

来源

JOURNAL OF REAL ESTATE FINANCE AND ECONOMICS,Vol.volumes-and-issues,Issue66-1,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

Whether household wealth affects labor market behavior is an important empirical question in economics. As the literature only discusses the effect of the absolute value of housing wealth on homeowners’ labor supply, this paper studies how a homeowner’s relative housing wealth—i.e., perceived housing wealth gain compared with their reference group-affects labor market behavior. Using China’s housing boom as a natural experiment, we first construct homeowners’ reference housing wealth using the hedonic method and then estimate the effect of homeowners’ relative housing wealth on labor supply. Subsequently, we identify a causal effect of relative housing wealth on homeowners’ labor supply using an instrumental variable approach and find that an appreciation in relative housing wealth does not significantly influence homeowners’ employment, but significantly reduces their working hours. Our results show that this reduction in working hours is mainly driven by female homeowners. Our results also suggest that the effects of relative housing wealth vary across educational backgrounds, marital statuses, and locations. We find that the effect is more pronounced for female homeowners who are less educated, married, and living in rural areas. Moreover, a set of robustness checks corroborates the validity of our identification strategies and tests the sensitivity of the results.