Abstract
Different from prior studies that examined the impact of economic, demographic, and behavioral factors on homeownership, this paper adds to the literature by explaining homeownership from the Confucian culture. Based on the dataset of the 2011 China Household Finance Survey, the results showed that a household head with more siblings was more likely to own a house, suggesting the interdependence within family members; when we divided the sample into male and female groups according to the gender of the household head, we found that the “sibling effect” only existed in male household heads, and both sisters and brothers contributed to the increase in the likelihood of owning a house, suggesting strong son preference. Additionally, we found that the “sibling effect” mainly arose from household heads with low- and middle-income or those living in high sex-ratio regions, which further supported our arguments. Finally, we analyzed the evolution of the interdependence within families in homeownership due to two important economic and demographic policies in China’s history: the reform and opening-up policy and the one-child policy.
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source: China’s Informal Finance Development Report in 2014
source: China’s Informal Finance Development Report in 2014
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Notes
Survey and Research Center for China Household Finance, 2014. China’s Informal Finance Development Report.
See Kirkman et al. (2006) for a comprehensive review of the literature.
The China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) has been conducted four times in 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. The data of the first round of the survey have been made fully available to researchers since 2012. Since we have no permission to use the other rounds of the data, we are only able to leverage the first round of the survey in 2011 to examine the impact of the Confucian culture on homeownership.
See Gan et al. (2014) for a more detailed description about the survey.
The provinces in the high-sex-ratio group include Jiangxi, Guangdong, Anhui, Henan, Guangxi, Hubei, Hunan, Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Gansu, Beijing and Zhejiang. The remaining 13 provinces belong to the low-sex-ratio group.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71603061), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong (Nos. 2019A1515011649).
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Wu, B., Bian, W., Xue, Y. et al. Confucian Culture and Homeownership: Evidence from Chinese Families. J Fam Econ Iss 42, 182–202 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-020-09685-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-020-09685-w