Abstract
This study examines the homeownership effect on the likelihood of marriage. Benefits brought by homeownership are highlighted in existing research. Specifically, owning a house may increase one’s attractiveness in the marriage market. Therefore, homeowners more likely get married than renters. We test this hypothesis by comparing the marriage rate between homeowners and renters in China, where house is often regarded as a prerequisite for marriage. We use the data from the China Family Panel Studies survey. After controlling for observables, homeownership increases the likelihood of marriage by approximately 6.8 percentage points, corresponding to an increase of 66.02% of the marriage rate relative to the average. Our results are robust after controlling for the sample selection bias, omitted personality characteristics, unobserved heterogeneity, accompaniment of homeownership to marriage, and model misspecification.
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Notes
Similar to other countries, homeowners in China can be categorized into “full” and “partial” owners. Partial owners are homeowners with an outstanding mortgage on their house, whereas full owners are those who own their houses outright (Schmalz et al. 2017). However, we do not distinguish these two kinds of homeownership in this paper.
In CFPS, the respondents are asked about the registered houseowner. The choices for this question are as follows: (1) self, (2) father, (3) mother, (4) spouse, and (5) child.
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Acknowledgements
This work was funded by The Major Research Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education (Grant no. 18JZD033), The Key Project of Enterprise Development and Transformation for Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (Grant no. 2019GBAZD05), and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 71774144; Grant no. 71902072).
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Hu, M., Wang, X. Homeownership and household formation: no homeownership, no marriage?. J Hous and the Built Environ 35, 763–781 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-019-09724-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-019-09724-5