Associate Professor Xi Yang examines how bank credit expansion shapes house prices and fertility

The Department of Property at the University of Auckland Business School hosted an online research seminar on Friday 18 September 2026, featuring Associate Professor Xi Yang from the University of North Texas, USA. Delivered via Zoom, the seminar was titled More Credit, More Babies? Bank Credit Expansion, House Prices, and Fertility.

Associate Professor Yang presented research estimating the causal impact of bank credit expansion on fertility, drawing on the interstate banking deregulation that took place in the United States during the 1990s. Using a staggered difference-in-differences approach, her study finds that increased credit supply reduces fertility rates by 10 percent and raises maternal age at first birth by 0.76 percent.

A central contribution of the research lies in identifying the mechanism behind this response. Associate Professor Yang showed that the fertility effect operates mainly through the rise in house prices that follows credit expansion, and that the effect is more evident in areas where housing supply is inelastic. The findings uncover a new channel linking financial market policy to demographic outcomes via housing affordability.

The topic carries clear relevance for New Zealand, where housing affordability remains a long-standing policy concern and where the interaction between credit conditions, house prices, and household decisions is of ongoing interest to researchers and policymakers. 

Associate Professor Yang is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of North Texas and affiliated faculty in the university’s Department of Data Science. She earned her PhD in Economics from Johns Hopkins University. Her research in labour and urban economics centres on housing affordability and its effects on family and labour market outcomes, household financial well-being, and economic inequality, and has appeared in the Journal of Urban Economics and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.