On November 3, 2016, our Assistant Professor Shimeng Liu was invited to attend Hang Lung Forum on Real Estate, organized by the Hang Lung Center for Real Estate at Tsinghua University, where he made a presentation on “Property Tax Limits and Female Labor Supply: Evidence from the Housing Boom and Bust”.

The study Shimeng Liu presented analyzes the impact of property tax limits on female labor supply. It exploits exogenous variation across time of housing market conditions in the housing boom and bust periods and geographic changes of property tax limits across states in the cross-state Combined Statistical Areas (CBSA) to identify a causal link between property tax limits and female labor supply. Theory predicts that the effects of property tax limits on female labor supply in the housing boom and bust periods are in opposite directions due to opposite income effects. As predicted, empirical results suggest that female labor force participation reduced by 0.7 to 1.4 percentage point in the housing boom (2005-2006) due to property tax limits. In contrast, females are associated with a negligible to 1.3 percentage point higher probability of workforce participation in the housing bust (2008-2009) due to such limits. Also, the study does not find an impact of property tax limits on hours of work for the female population.