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Housing and fertility

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View the page of Sarah Brauner-Otto

Postponement of first birth has implications for the health and well-being of women and is often associated with lower fertility levels, a demographic reality affecting most high-income countries. Country-level institutional differences are one factor behind the variation in fertility in these countries. Sarah Brauner-Otto examines the relationship between housing and mean age at first birth across 39 low-fertility countries.

Image courtesy of interviewee. June 12, 2024

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This video discusses a research paper that examines the relationship between housing and family formation, particularly in wealthy industrialized countries facing low fertility rates. The paper argues that housing is a significant social institution affecting when and how people have children, despite the common perspective of childbearing being a private issue. Key points from the research include:

1. **Fertility Trends**: Declining fertility rates are linked to women having children later in life and fewer children overall, impacting health and societal demographics.

2. **Influence of Housing**: The delay in having children is often tied to young adults' need for stable housing. The paper emphasizes that while previous research has focused on education, government policy, and the labor market, the role of housing has been underexplored.

3. **Homeownership vs. Renting**: Homeowners tend to have children sooner than renters, as owning a home signals stability and readiness for parenthood. However, rising housing costs could delay childbearing if young people prioritize buying homes first.

4. **Contextual Factors**: The study addresses the broader housing context, including mortgage availability and government subsidies, which significantly differ across countries. Increased rental availability and support for homebuyers were found to be associated with earlier family formation in recent years.

5. **Comparative Analysis**: The research distinguishes between former communist and non-communist countries, revealing that housing dynamics and their effects on fertility differ substantially between these groups. For instance, in former communist nations, rental housing is often associated with economic instability, impacting fertility negatively.

Overall, the study highlights the evolving relationship between housing conditions and family formation, suggesting that societal norms regarding homeownership and rental housing are changing. The paper calls for further research into individual-level data and qualitative studies to better understand these dynamics.

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Here are some articles that discuss similar themes regarding the relationship between housing, fertility rates, and family formation in industrialized countries:

1. **"Housing Affordability and Fertility: Evidence from Europe"**
This article investigates how housing costs influence fertility decisions across different European countries. It explores the trade-offs that young couples face between purchasing a home and starting a family, highlighting the impact of housing policies on childbearing rates.

2. **"The Role of Housing in Childbearing Decisions: Insights from the United States"**
This research examines how housing stability and homeownership affect family formation in the U.S. It discusses the demographic trends of delayed childbearing and how homeowners typically have children sooner than renters, echoing the findings of the original paper.

3. **"Socioeconomic Factors Influencing Fertility Rates: A Comparative Study of Communist and Non-Communist Countries"**
This article analyzes the different factors affecting fertility rates in former communist countries compared to their non-communist counterparts, focusing on how housing policies, economic stability, and societal attitudes toward homeownership impact family planning.

4. **"Housing Market Dynamics and Family Choices: A Global Perspective"**
This study looks at the interplay between housing markets and family formation choices globally, discussing how varying national policies on housing affect fertility rates and family structures.

5. **"The Impact of Rental Housing on Family Formation Patterns"**
This article explores the effects of rental availability and security on young adults' decisions about marriage and parenting, providing insights into how rental markets can either promote or hinder family formation.

6. **"Childbearing in an Era of Housing Affordability Crises"**
This piece addresses the rising housing costs in many urban centers and their implications for childbearing decisions, stressing the importance of affordable housing policies in promoting family growth.

These articles should complement the themes presented in your original video regarding the multifaceted relationship between housing conditions and family formation trends.

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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This question of how important is housing

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for family formation is what this paper sets out to address.

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Many wealthy industrialized countries are seeing low

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and decreasing fertility rates

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because women are having children later in life

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and having fewer of 'em.

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This then has implications for the women themselves

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as they facing, such as challenges conceiving in older ages

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and other health implications.

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And it has implications for populations, countries

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who face changing age structures as a result of this lower

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and later childbearing.

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So then the broader research on family formation shows

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that even though as individuals we think of having children

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as a very private

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and intimate issue, it is also highly influenced

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by the broader society

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or country level institutions in which people live.

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When scholars talk specifically about these low

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and decreasing fertility rates, they commonly point to

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and have conducted a fair amount

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of research on institutions such as education

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or government policy, the labor market, gender norms.

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In addition, in these countries,

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the normative expectation is

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that young people will leave their natal homes sometime

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during the young adult years, but

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before they start having their own children.

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So then childbearing is postponed

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until they have their own place to live.

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Meaning housing is another important institution to study,

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but there's been far less research on it.

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And so this paper aims to provide some empirical evidence on

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how housing as a social institution may be related

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to fertility at the country level.

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The existing literature gives us a good starting point for

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how to think about this relationship

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between housing and fertility.

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For example, thinking about home ownership, we know

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that homeowners are more likely

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to have children than renters,

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and that couples often purchase homes in anticipation

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of becoming parents.

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There's also literature demonstrating

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that owner occupied homes are often

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of higher quality than rented ones

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and are in more family friendly types of locations.

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The literature also identifies

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that owning a home could be an important signal to society,

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that, a person has become an adult

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and is in a secure position ready to tackle this task

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of raising children.

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But both owning a home and raising children are expensive.

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So when faced with how

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to spend these limited resources right now,

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young people may opt to purchase a home now

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and wait to have children later, which leads us to expect

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that if home ownership is somehow easier, cheaper,

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or more accessible to young people, they would be able

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to get into those homes that are ideal

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for having and raising children.

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They'd be able to get into those homes

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earlier in the life course.

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One contribution this study makes here is that we think

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that the cost of housing is

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beyond simply thinking about purchasing prices.

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Those are certainly important, but so is the broader

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Borrowing context

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because borrowing is a big part

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of purchasing a home in many parts of the world.

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So if mortgages are relatively easy to get

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or interest rates are low, then the price

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of housing may not be as much of a barrier for people.

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Although kind of going back to housing prices, they are,

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gonna be important.

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And although there is this literature that,

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that I was just saying that finds as housing prices rise,

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access is restricted

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and childbearing occurs later, there's also some literature

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that finds that there may be a positive effect

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of wealth on home ownership.

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So homeowners accrue wealth as housing prices rise

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and that accumulated wealth supports childbearing,

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but only for those as homeowners.

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So then we would expect that as housing prices rise,

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we would see, earlier childbearing among homeowners,

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but not among people who are renting.

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And that leads us to another important contribution

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of our paper, which is

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that we don't just focus on homeowners,

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and the home ownership or home buying context.

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We also incorporate the renting context into our

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conceptualization of the housing institution.

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And here, the literature points to what

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as a sociologist, I think is really interesting,

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which is the potential importance of culture.

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So if rental housing is widely available

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and culturally acceptable, then we would expect

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that young people can move out

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of their parental home earlier.

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And then finally, the previous literature also says

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that government subsidies is another factor

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that may be particularly helpful for younger people

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to gain access to their own independent rented living space.

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And then because these dimensions of the context of housing,

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things like housing prices, mortgage availability,

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interest rates, owner occupant,

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occupancy versus renting,

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and government suby subsidies, government subsidies.

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Since all of those tend

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to vary quite substantially across countries,

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this paper is gonna examine these associations

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at the country level.

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Another way that our paper adds

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to the literature on social institutions

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and fertility is by explicitly examining differences

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between former communist countries

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and non former communist countries.

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There are a few key important differences in housing across

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these two regimes.

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So first, following the end of socialism,

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there was substantial investment from the World Bank

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and the IMF to create financial institutions

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that are necessary to support an open market housing system

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under that would operate under this new capitalism.

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But exactly how that unfolded was

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different in different places.

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So now there is substantial variation across countries in

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Terms of the place

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or the role of home ownership in society,

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and also differences in the process of accumulating homes,

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during this transition period.

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So some countries have remained culturally

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resistant to mortgage debt.

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It wasn't a part of life, under capitalism,

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or sorry, it wasn't a part of life under communism,

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and it's continues to not be a part of, home ownership.

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Instead, they may,

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rely more on large transfers from family members,

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and not on formal mortgages.

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And that that reliance on family

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to support home ownership is something we also

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see in southern Europe.

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So you have some southern European

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and some former, communist countries where

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mortgages are not a big part of the home ownership story

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and others where there are widespread mortgage, markets

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that are quite active.

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So that's one difference between former communist

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and non-communist countries.

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A second difference is that it's not actually clear

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that owner-occupied housing is a better quality

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or more desirable in former communist countries.

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So under communism government housing was an important

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social benefit, which means that those renter homes

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received investment in maintenance.

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Um, and so were very well maintained.

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And also the government housing was an important way

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governments could reward people

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who were supporting the party, say

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by having very large families.

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So for example, in Hungary, families with three

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or more children had priority for public housing.

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Um, and so those homes may not be,

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those former renter homes may not be as under

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as under desirable

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as renter homes in non-formal communist countries.

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Also in former communist countries, many people

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who are homeowners today became so

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during the tumultuous transition to capitalism, meaning,

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they may not have had the financial means

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to maintain their homes.

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Many of the homes they had previously had not been well

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maintained, but the specific nature of

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that transition period allowed them to become home owners.

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So because of those differences, we wanna look at

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former communists and non former communist countries.

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Separately for this study,

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we are looking at country level associations over time.

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We compiled information on housing

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and fertility for 39 low fertility countries from

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1993 to 2017.

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We have 15 former communists

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and 24 non former communist countries to measure fertility.

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We focus on the timing of childbearing

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with the period mean age at first birth,

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which we obtained from

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The human fertility database

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for all these countries over all these years.

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To measure the housing context,

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we compiled data from a range of sources,

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including annual hydrostat reports published

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by the European Mortgage Federation, Eurostat

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and the World Bank, and we end up

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with six distinct indicators of housing

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to measure renter support.

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We have the percent of housing units

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that are owner occupied, which is a measure of the size

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of the rental market, and we capture government subsidies

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as the percent of GDP spent on rent subsidies

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or other cash benefits to individuals

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that can help with housing costs.

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On the homeowner side, we have housing prices,

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interest rates and mortgage debt per capita,

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and the mortgage debt ratio.

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Those latter two are both measures of

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how widespread mortgages are in a country.

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We also looked at some composite index measures, one

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for renters, for one for home buyers,

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and one, that puts 'em both together.

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Then for our analysis,

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we estimate models predicting the mean age of childbearing,

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pooling the data for all countries

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and including country level fixed effects controls

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for years, GDP, female labor force participation,

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youth unemployment, population density,

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and the percent of the population living in rural areas.

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Our key terms of interest are the measure of housing context

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that's lagged two years prior to the fertility variable.

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So to try to capture the housing context when people

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would've been making the decision to have children

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before, conception actually happened.

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Overall, there are two main findings.

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So first, we see change over time in the relationship

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between housing context in Egypt first birth,

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and second, we see differences between former communist

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and non-formal communist countries to the first point

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by the end of our study period, 2017, more rental

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or rental availability is associated

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with earlier family formation

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and more support for home buyers is also associated

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with earlier family formation.

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But those are both flips from earlier in the study period

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in the 1990s.

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Then turning to our second main finding,

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when we look separately by communist history,

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we see some interesting things

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for the non former communist countries.

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Again, at the end of the study period, we see

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that larger renter support was associated

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with earlier fertility

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and that this is a switch from earlier in the 1990s.

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But among former communist countries, we see the opposite.

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So historically in the 1990s,

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low owner occupancy was associated with earlier fertility.

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Maybe this is because government housing was used

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specifically to support earlier

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and higher fertility. But now,

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Uh, at the end of the study period,

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low owner occupancy is associated with later fertility.

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So now in former communist countries, renting does not seem

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to be a housing context that supports childbearing.

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Turning to our measures home buyers,

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the most notable difference between the former communists

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and the non-formal communist countries is that we find

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that housing prices were not related to the mean age

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of first birth for the non-communist countries,

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but for former communist countries.

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By the end of the study period, we find support

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for this positive wealth effect.

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So countries with higher housing prices,

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these former con communist countries

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with housing higher former communist countries

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with higher housing prices had earlier childbearing.

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And this may be because the high ownership rates in these

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countries really grew out of this transition

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to the market economy.

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And that means that there's an exceptionally large percent

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of the population who's able

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to feel the wealth benefits from rising home prices.

12:57.415 --> 13:01.345
Overall, our results support the theoretical frameworks

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that point to housing as an important factor

13:03.225 --> 13:04.545
shaping family formation.

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But that how it does that.

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So how, okay, I'm gonna stop here.

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Our results support the frameworks that point to housing

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as an important factor shaping family formation,

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but how it does that has changed over time.

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So this is in line with literature on other social

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institutions such as female labor force participation, where

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historically countries with high female labor force

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participation have lower fertility.

13:32.845 --> 13:34.425
But since the 1990s, those

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with high female labor force participation

13:36.535 --> 13:37.625
have higher fertility.

13:37.885 --> 13:41.625
So we're seeing our research shows a similar flip in the

13:41.625 --> 13:43.385
relationship between this broad social

13:43.535 --> 13:45.305
institution and fertility.

13:46.525 --> 13:49.905
It appears that some of this shift is due to differences

13:50.245 --> 13:51.505
by country history.

13:52.085 --> 13:54.225
So while initially we found evidence

13:54.225 --> 13:56.145
that in recent years more support

13:56.145 --> 13:58.705
for home buyers was related to earlier fertility,

13:59.095 --> 14:00.665
once we look at former communist

14:00.665 --> 14:03.545
and non, former communist countries separately,

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we can see that the, that

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that initial finding is almost entirely due

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to differences in the country groups

14:09.925 --> 14:12.745
and not differences in home buyer supports per se.

14:14.125 --> 14:17.105
For renters, we find opposite relationships

14:17.175 --> 14:19.785
between these group country groups such

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that renter support is related

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to earlier fertility in non-communist countries,

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but later fertility in non former communist countries,

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but later fertility in former communist countries.

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Sorry. This means that in non-communist countries,

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there does appear to be a change in the meaning of housing.

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So it may be that rental housing is now an acceptable place

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to be living when people start having children

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Owning a home is no longer seen as a

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Necessary condition for having children

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in these non-communist countries.

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On the other hand, in former communist countries,

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rental housing may be a sign of real instability

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and economic strain such

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that those living in rental housing feel that they need

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to wait to have children.

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Maybe they were so disadvantaged previously

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that they were disconnected from the new market economy

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and really left out of that transition system that led

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to the high ownership rates

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that we see in former communist countries.

15:24.865 --> 15:27.325
Um, there are several areas

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for future research motivated by this paper.

15:30.975 --> 15:33.165
First, there are some key dimensions

15:33.165 --> 15:35.205
of housing we did not have data on and

15:35.205 --> 15:37.325
therefore couldn't include here.

15:37.665 --> 15:40.805
I'm thinking of direct measures of, size

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of the housing unit, quality of it,

15:43.185 --> 15:47.535
and then cost of rental units as second area for research.

15:47.955 --> 15:52.575
Uh, is that our, while our findings hint to changes in norms

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and expectations regarding housing,

15:55.335 --> 15:58.015
I think other qualitative research should really look

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into those mechanisms

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and processes more closely to see what's really happening.

16:05.195 --> 16:06.655
And then third,

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we examine these associations at the country level.

16:10.835 --> 16:12.895
So we certainly need to have some more

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analysis at the individual level

16:15.195 --> 16:17.015
to see which characteristics

16:17.015 --> 16:20.055
of housing are most relevant for individuals.

16:20.555 --> 16:24.495
But overall, our findings, support ideas

16:24.565 --> 16:28.335
that expectations regarding the importance of home ownership

16:28.395 --> 16:30.495
for family formation or changing,

16:30.835 --> 16:33.535
and that those expectations vary a lot across country.

00:00 - This question of how important is housing for family formation is what this paper sets out to address. Many wealthy industrialized countries are seeing low and decreasing fertility rates because women are having children later in life and having fewer of 'em.

00:14 - This then has implications for the women themselves as they facing, such as challenges conceiving in older ages and other health implications. And it has implications for populations, countries who face changing age structures as a result of this lower and later childbearing. So then the broader research on family formation shows that even though as individuals we think of having children as a very private and intimate issue, it is also highly influenced

00:41 - by the broader society or country level institutions in which people live. When scholars talk specifically about these low and decreasing fertility rates, they commonly point to and have conducted a fair amount of research on institutions such as education or government policy, the labor market, gender norms. In addition, in these countries, the normative expectation is that young people will leave their natal homes sometime

01:09 - during the young adult years, but before they start having their own children. So then childbearing is postponed until they have their own place to live. Meaning housing is another important institution to study, but there's been far less research on it. And so this paper aims to provide some empirical evidence on how housing as a social institution may be related to fertility at the country level. The existing literature gives us a good starting point for

01:36 - how to think about this relationship between housing and fertility. For example, thinking about home ownership, we know that homeowners are more likely to have children than renters, and that couples often purchase homes in anticipation of becoming parents. There's also literature demonstrating that owner occupied homes are often of higher quality than rented ones

01:59 - and are in more family friendly types of locations. The literature also identifies that owning a home could be an important signal to society, that, a person has become an adult and is in a secure position ready to tackle this task of raising children. But both owning a home and raising children are expensive. So when faced with how to spend these limited resources right now, young people may opt to purchase a home now

02:27 - and wait to have children later, which leads us to expect that if home ownership is somehow easier, cheaper, or more accessible to young people, they would be able to get into those homes that are ideal for having and raising children. They'd be able to get into those homes earlier in the life course. One contribution this study makes here is that we think that the cost of housing is beyond simply thinking about purchasing prices.

02:56 - Those are certainly important, but so is the broader Borrowing context because borrowing is a big part of purchasing a home in many parts of the world. So if mortgages are relatively easy to get or interest rates are low, then the price of housing may not be as much of a barrier for people. Although kind of going back to housing prices, they are, gonna be important. And although there is this literature that,

03:23 - that I was just saying that finds as housing prices rise, access is restricted and childbearing occurs later, there's also some literature that finds that there may be a positive effect of wealth on home ownership. So homeowners accrue wealth as housing prices rise and that accumulated wealth supports childbearing, but only for those as homeowners. So then we would expect that as housing prices rise, we would see, earlier childbearing among homeowners,

03:52 - but not among people who are renting. And that leads us to another important contribution of our paper, which is that we don't just focus on homeowners, and the home ownership or home buying context. We also incorporate the renting context into our conceptualization of the housing institution. And here, the literature points to what as a sociologist, I think is really interesting, which is the potential importance of culture.

04:24 - So if rental housing is widely available and culturally acceptable, then we would expect that young people can move out of their parental home earlier. And then finally, the previous literature also says that government subsidies is another factor that may be particularly helpful for younger people to gain access to their own independent rented living space. And then because these dimensions of the context of housing, things like housing prices, mortgage availability,

04:56 - interest rates, owner occupant, occupancy versus renting, and government suby subsidies, government subsidies. Since all of those tend to vary quite substantially across countries, this paper is gonna examine these associations at the country level. Another way that our paper adds to the literature on social institutions and fertility is by explicitly examining differences

05:21 - between former communist countries and non former communist countries. There are a few key important differences in housing across these two regimes. So first, following the end of socialism, there was substantial investment from the World Bank and the IMF to create financial institutions that are necessary to support an open market housing system under that would operate under this new capitalism. But exactly how that unfolded was

05:50 - different in different places. So now there is substantial variation across countries in Terms of the place or the role of home ownership in society, and also differences in the process of accumulating homes, during this transition period. So some countries have remained culturally resistant to mortgage debt. It wasn't a part of life, under capitalism, or sorry, it wasn't a part of life under communism,

06:19 - and it's continues to not be a part of, home ownership. Instead, they may, rely more on large transfers from family members, and not on formal mortgages. And that that reliance on family to support home ownership is something we also see in southern Europe. So you have some southern European and some former, communist countries where mortgages are not a big part of the home ownership story

06:50 - and others where there are widespread mortgage, markets that are quite active. So that's one difference between former communist and non-communist countries. A second difference is that it's not actually clear that owner-occupied housing is a better quality or more desirable in former communist countries. So under communism government housing was an important social benefit, which means that those renter homes received investment in maintenance.

07:24 - and so were very well maintained. And also the government housing was an important way governments could reward people who were supporting the party, say by having very large families. So for example, in Hungary, families with three or more children had priority for public housing. and so those homes may not be, those former renter homes may not be as under as under desirable

07:54 - as renter homes in non-formal communist countries. Also in former communist countries, many people who are homeowners today became so during the tumultuous transition to capitalism, meaning, they may not have had the financial means to maintain their homes. Many of the homes they had previously had not been well maintained, but the specific nature of that transition period allowed them to become home owners. So because of those differences, we wanna look at

08:25 - former communists and non former communist countries. Separately for this study, we are looking at country level associations over time. We compiled information on housing and fertility for 39 low fertility countries from 1993 to 2017. We have 15 former communists and 24 non former communist countries to measure fertility. We focus on the timing of childbearing with the period mean age at first birth,

08:53 - which we obtained from The human fertility database for all these countries over all these years. To measure the housing context, we compiled data from a range of sources, including annual hydrostat reports published by the European Mortgage Federation, Eurostat and the World Bank, and we end up with six distinct indicators of housing to measure renter support.

09:17 - We have the percent of housing units that are owner occupied, which is a measure of the size of the rental market, and we capture government subsidies as the percent of GDP spent on rent subsidies or other cash benefits to individuals that can help with housing costs. On the homeowner side, we have housing prices, interest rates and mortgage debt per capita, and the mortgage debt ratio. Those latter two are both measures of

09:45 - how widespread mortgages are in a country. We also looked at some composite index measures, one for renters, for one for home buyers, and one, that puts 'em both together. Then for our analysis, we estimate models predicting the mean age of childbearing, pooling the data for all countries and including country level fixed effects controls for years, GDP, female labor force participation, youth unemployment, population density,

10:15 - and the percent of the population living in rural areas. Our key terms of interest are the measure of housing context that's lagged two years prior to the fertility variable. So to try to capture the housing context when people would've been making the decision to have children before, conception actually happened. Overall, there are two main findings. So first, we see change over time in the relationship between housing context in Egypt first birth, and second, we see differences between former communist

10:46 - and non-formal communist countries to the first point by the end of our study period, 2017, more rental or rental availability is associated with earlier family formation and more support for home buyers is also associated with earlier family formation. But those are both flips from earlier in the study period in the 1990s. Then turning to our second main finding, when we look separately by communist history,

11:17 - we see some interesting things for the non former communist countries. Again, at the end of the study period, we see that larger renter support was associated with earlier fertility and that this is a switch from earlier in the 1990s. But among former communist countries, we see the opposite. So historically in the 1990s, low owner occupancy was associated with earlier fertility. Maybe this is because government housing was used

11:48 - specifically to support earlier and higher fertility. But now, at the end of the study period, low owner occupancy is associated with later fertility. So now in former communist countries, renting does not seem to be a housing context that supports childbearing. Turning to our measures home buyers, the most notable difference between the former communists and the non-formal communist countries is that we find that housing prices were not related to the mean age

12:19 - of first birth for the non-communist countries, but for former communist countries. By the end of the study period, we find support for this positive wealth effect. So countries with higher housing prices, these former con communist countries with housing higher former communist countries with higher housing prices had earlier childbearing. And this may be because the high ownership rates in these countries really grew out of this transition

12:46 - to the market economy. And that means that there's an exceptionally large percent of the population who's able to feel the wealth benefits from rising home prices. Overall, our results support the theoretical frameworks that point to housing as an important factor shaping family formation. But that how it does that. So how, okay, I'm gonna stop here. Our results support the frameworks that point to housing

13:16 - as an important factor shaping family formation, but how it does that has changed over time. So this is in line with literature on other social institutions such as female labor force participation, where historically countries with high female labor force participation have lower fertility. But since the 1990s, those with high female labor force participation have higher fertility. So we're seeing our research shows a similar flip in the

13:41 - relationship between this broad social institution and fertility. It appears that some of this shift is due to differences by country history. So while initially we found evidence that in recent years more support for home buyers was related to earlier fertility, once we look at former communist and non, former communist countries separately, we can see that the, that

14:05 - that initial finding is almost entirely due to differences in the country groups and not differences in home buyer supports per se. For renters, we find opposite relationships between these group country groups such that renter support is related to earlier fertility in non-communist countries, but later fertility in non former communist countries, but later fertility in former communist countries. Sorry. This means that in non-communist countries,

14:38 - there does appear to be a change in the meaning of housing. So it may be that rental housing is now an acceptable place to be living when people start having children Owning a home is no longer seen as a Necessary condition for having children in these non-communist countries. On the other hand, in former communist countries, rental housing may be a sign of real instability and economic strain such that those living in rental housing feel that they need

15:05 - to wait to have children. Maybe they were so disadvantaged previously that they were disconnected from the new market economy and really left out of that transition system that led to the high ownership rates that we see in former communist countries. there are several areas for future research motivated by this paper. First, there are some key dimensions of housing we did not have data on and

15:35 - therefore couldn't include here. I'm thinking of direct measures of, size of the housing unit, quality of it, and then cost of rental units as second area for research. is that our, while our findings hint to changes in norms and expectations regarding housing, I think other qualitative research should really look into those mechanisms and processes more closely to see what's really happening. And then third,

16:07 - we examine these associations at the country level. So we certainly need to have some more analysis at the individual level to see which characteristics of housing are most relevant for individuals. But overall, our findings, support ideas that expectations regarding the importance of home ownership for family formation or changing, and that those expectations vary a lot across country.

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