‘I don't have enough time to provide enough evidence to convince you on them, but I'm happy to talk about evidence on any of them.’
- ‘But I'm going to just pick one variable to show you some evidence on the consequence of this demographic force, relative shortage of brides for housing prices.’
‘Consider these two graphs using data from 2005.’
- ‘They all about the housing price, skewed by something relative to local generational male to female ratio.’
‘The graph on the left compares rural areas in China - 14 rural areas on the horizontal axis – by the local young men to young woman ratio for the age cohort, 15 to 35, approximately for dating and marriage market.’
- ‘On the vertical axis is local housing value to local income.’
- ‘What you see is that across rural towns, those that have more skewed gender ratio imbalance tend to have higher local housing price to local household income ratio, holding constant local income, economic structures, and so on.’
‘The graph on the right compares cities to cities in the same way - cities sorted cities by the local young men to young women ratio.’
- ‘Again you find that the cities with higher gender ratio imbalance tend to give you higher housing price to household income, holding constant local income, economic structures, and so on.’
‘Compare these with graph showing the impact of the same factors on rental prices:’
‘Here, the horizontal axis is the same, sorting regions by local sex ratio for the youth cohort.’
- ‘The vertical axis is the local housing value to rent.’
‘If the popular explanation for the rising houses prices is true, you should get the same picture for housing and rental prices.’
- ‘But, as you can see, regions with stronger gender imbalances give you higher housing prices relative to rental prices.’
‘This is illustration of the kind of evidence we can find that suggests the gender imbalance plays a role in pushing up asset prices, in this case in pushing up demand for assets that translate into higher housing price.’
