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SeedPublished 2026-10-23

Housing costs and the fertility decline

Fertility is one of the fastest-growing keywords in the economics journals, as birth rates hit record lows in East Asia and elsewhere. Housing prices are a large topic too, but only 5 of 94 recent fertility papers carry a housing keyword. How much of the fertility decline do housing costs explain, and do housing policies raise births?

economicshouseholds

What prompted this#

On the economics dashboard, "fertility" had 15 papers in July–September 2026 against about 8 expected from its earlier share, and "housing market" is growing as well (13 against 8). Since October 2025, 94 papers carry a fertility keyword (87 in economics journals). Only 5 of them also carry a housing keyword, while "housing prices" appears on 123 papers.

Questions#

  • Do couples in places where housing costs rose faster have fewer children, or the same number later?
  • Do owners and renters respond differently to rising house prices (a wealth gain for one, a cost for the other)?
  • Did housing support for families, such as subsidies and priority access in China, Korea or Japan, change births?

Data that could help#

Regional births and house prices, household panels such as the China Family Panel Studies (see the dataset ranking), and the timing of family housing policies.

Next step#

Relate city-level birth rates in China to house-price growth for 2010–2023, separately for cities with mostly owners and cities with many renters.

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
KeywordPapers, last 30 daysRankPapers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26*Papers, last 36 months
fertility3#776119
fertility decline0–61
housing prices4#525347

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/housing-costs-and-the-fertility-decline.md

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Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Housing costs and the fertility decline. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/housing-costs-and-the-fertility-decline

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-housing-costs-and-the-fertility-decline,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Housing costs and the fertility decline},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/housing-costs-and-the-fertility-decline}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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