Siblings effects and housing tenure decisions: evidence from China

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the effect of siblings that a household head and spouse have on households housing tenure decision. Based on a sample of the China Health and Nutrition survey data that spans from 2000 till 2015, we find that households whose head and spouse have more siblings tend to have a higher probability of owning houses they occupy. This effect remains robust under different model specifications and instrumental variable estimation. In addition, we find that only when siblings have better home ownership status, households may have a higher probability of owning house when siblings incomes increases.

KEYWORDS:

• Siblings effects
• housing tenure decisions
• China urban households
• China health and nutrition survey

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• R21
• O18

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The data can be downloaded from http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/china. More detailed information of the data could also be found from the above link.

² The reason that we can do such a match is because CHNS is designed to track families and their split-off families over time. However, because of sample attrition, the matched sample is significantly smaller compared to the original sample.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 71603061, 71403061), the Philosophy and Social Science Programming Foundation of Guangzhou (Project No. 2018GZYB56), the Fund Projects of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (Project No. 299-GK18GS25) and the Foundation of South China Institute of Fortune Management Research.