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Abstract
This study examines how homeownership is associated with fertility intentions among migrant population in urban China. Using data from the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey, after controlling for a wide range of household demographical and socioeconomic characteristics and city fixed effects, we find that homeowners are on average 1.12 percentage points more likely to desire future children than renters. The estimated homeownership effect has on average a 7.8% increase in the desire for future children. This result is robust to a series of different model specifications. Moreover, we find that the homeownership effect on fertility intentions mainly occurs in households without children. Homeowners having full property ownership have a higher desire for future children than renters. On the contrary, those having joint ownership of property do not differ much from renters in terms of the desire for future children.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 We focus on the 2017 wave of CMDS, which is the latest available dataset of the survey, to immunize the estimated results against the impacts of family planning policy (Wei & Zhang, Citation2011). The family planning policy, also known as the one-child policy, was implemented in the early 1980s to strictly limited most families to only one child, mainly aiming at decreasing the country’s explosive population growth (Lee, Citation2012). Households who violated the policy, i.e. had a second child without permission, received severe administrative and economic sanctions from work units or the government (Li & Cooney, Citation1993). The one-child policy partially ended in 2013 and was replaced by the selective two-child policy, which allowed couples to have two children if one of them was an only child. The one-child policy was fully abolished in 2016 when all couples were allowed to have two children, i.e. the universal two-child policy (Pan & Liu, Citation2021).
2 In 1998, the Chinese government launched a nation-wide housing privatization reform that allowed public housing tenants to buy their state-owned housing units at heavily subsidized prices (Wang, Citation2012). This reform lifted the homeownership rate in urban China from less than 30% to more than 80% within one decade (Chen & Hu, Citation2019). Today China is a country of homeowners with more than 90% of households owning homes (87% in urban and 96% in rural China) (Huang et al., Citation2021). However, the floating population have a pretty lower homeownership rate (Huang et al., Citation2021). Indeed, we find that only 35.81 of migrants in urban China own a home in the study period, as shown in .
3 The IV approach is executed with IVProbit model that fits specifications with binary dependent variables and endogenous regressors. The model jointly estimates the first and second-stage equations via maximum likelihood. These estimations were run by using the ivprobit command in STATA.