Journal of Family and Economic Issues

, Volume 33, Issue 1, pp 108–117 | Cite as

The Crowding-out Effect of Homeownership on Fertility

Original Paper
First Online:

Abstract

Mulder (Demogr Res 15:401–412, 2006) argues that homeownership has influences on a household’s fertility decision; however, literatures have concluded different findings regarding whether homeownership promotes or delays a family’s reproduction behavior. In this study, we construct the regional-based panel data comprising 23 counties and cities from 1994 to 2007 in Taiwan to investigate how and to what extent homeownership will affect fertility. Our empirical results show that the private homeownership rate is negatively related to the birthrate in Taiwan. It indicates that, under limited budget resources available in each household, the homeownership and reproduction decisions seem to compete and crowd out each other; however, from the results of the lagged models, the crowding-out effect diminishes as time goes by.

Keywords

Fertility Homeownership Panel data Taiwan 
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Notes

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the anonymous referees and the editor of the journal for their helpful comments. In addition, the financial support from the National Science Council in Taiwan (NSC-96-2415-H-004-010) and the research assistance of Min-Yu Wu are gratefully acknowledged.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Public FinanceNational Chengchi UniversityWenshanTaiwan

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