Can Housing Wealth Promote Children’s Cognitive Abilities?

As an important part of family wealth,housing wealth has a very important influence on families.With the housing commercialization reform in 1998,the scale of the real estate market has expanded,accompanied with continuously rising housing price and increased family’s housing wealth.Then will this kind of property wealth appreciation have an impact on the family’s educational consumption expenditure,and whether it plays a role in the embodiment of educational achievements——cognitive ability,is the focus of this paper.In this paper,the data of CFPS database in 2012 and 2016 are used to form mixed cross-sectional data.Through using instrumental variable,which is the logarithmic value of land transfer area and residential land supply area in the previous year,the endogenous problem of OLS multiple regression is overcome,and the influence of net housing wealth on children’s cognitive ability is empirically analyzed.The results show that the net housing wealth has a significant positive impact on children’s cognitive ability.When the net housing wealth increases by 1%,children’s word,mathematical and comprehensive cognitive ability will increase by 0.003,0.005 and0.006 unit respectively.After using alternative variables and exogenous data,the results are still robust.In addition,there are still differences in the influence of net housing wealth on children’s cognitive ability in hukou(family registration),age,gender and eastern-western regions: compared with child with city hukou,housing wealth has a more significant influence on children’s cognitive ability with rural hukou;The marginal effect of net housing wealth on cognitive ability of children aged13-15 is significantly greater than that of children aged 10-12;Girls’ cognitive ability is more susceptible to the influence of net housing wealth;and the net housing wealth has a more significant impact on the cognitive ability of children in the central and western regions.In addition,in the two-stage instrumental variable regression,we find that the land transfer area has a significant role in promoting housing wealth in short term.