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Résumé (français)

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Résumé (anglais)

The price of housing is an important and under-studied candidate for consideration in fertility decisions. Theoretically, higher housing prices will cause renters to have fewer additional children, and home owners to have more children if they already have sufficient housing and low substitution between children and other “goods”, and fewer children otherwise. In this paper, we combine longitudinal data from the Canadian Survey of Labour Income and Dynamics (SLID) and housing price data from the Canadian Real Estate Association to estimate the effect of housing price on fertility. We follow non-moving women aged 18-40 (with their associated families) over time to ask whether changes in lagged housing price affects marginal or total fertility. For home owners, we find that lagged housing prices are positively associated with marginal fertility using pooled cross section or fixed effects, negatively associated with total fertility under pooled cross section, but positively associated using fixed effects. For renters, lagged housing prices are not significantly negatively associated with either total or marginal fertility measures.