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Valencià
Applied Seminar
Universida de Alicante
17-Jul-2023
Seminario 3 – 14:30
This paper shows that high House Prices delay the mean age at which women become mothers for the first time. We hypothesize that this is because a longer period of saving is required to purchase a house, a key determinant in family planning. Our identification strategy exploits a quasi-natural experiment to identify an exogenous increase in house prices: the 1980s Banking Deregulation in the USA. States that deregulated earlier experienced stronger growth in both credit and house prices. While high house prices delay the purchase of a home, increased access to credit potentially facilitates earlier purchase. Building on advances in econometric techniques, we use staggered Diff-in-Diff to compare states that deregulated early with those that deregulated late and the heterogeneity in deregulation timing as an Instrumental Variable for House Prices. Our results show that the house price channel dominates. Banking deregulation and the subsequent boom in house prices caused an increase in the mean of mothers’ age at first child, while the credit channel did not reduce it.