Rising housing prices and marriage delays in China: Evidence from the urban land transaction policy

Abstract

In recent years, the phenomenon of delayed age at first marriage and declining fertility in China has become increasingly prominent, and high housing prices may be one of the triggers. By exploiting the quasi-natural experiment of the urban land transaction policy (ULTP) since 2002 and using the nationally representative data from the China Labor-force Dynamic Survey (CLDS), we employed a difference-in-differences (DID) method to identify the causal effects of rising housing prices on marriage delays. The results show that rising housing prices from the ULTP significantly delayed the age of first marriage by 0.2280 years old, with males delaying by 0.4372 years old. In addition, we found that rising housing prices raised the cost of first marriage; instead, young people with houses have a younger age at first marriage. Furthermore, the marriage delay effect of rising housing prices is more pronounced for more educated females, males with more siblings, and individuals from large cities. Worse, the effect of delayed marriage caused by rising housing prices further depressed fertility intentions and reduced the actual fertility rate. These findings complemented to the research field on the impact of rising housing prices and provided some insights for refining real estate public policies.