Topic: Scared Away Credit Demand Response to Expected Motherhood Penalty in the Labor Market

Speaker: Wenlan Qian, Professor of Finance and Real Estate, Ng Teng Fong Chair Professor in Real Estate, NUS Business School

Time: 10:00am-11:30am, October 11 (Beijing Time)

Location: 4-101

Abstract:

We exploit a policy reform that exogenously deteriorates mothers’ job prospects. China switched from a one-child policy to two-child in 2016, which increased female workers’ childbearing and caring responsibilities. Using a leading peer-to-peer lending platform targeting college students in China, we find that loan applications from female college students decrease by 15.6% relative to male students after the reform. The drop suggests that female students can anticipate the poorer future job prospects; they reduce their expenditure and invest less in human capital accordingly. Applications for long-term and large-amount loans and loans for human capital investment purposes experience the largest decline. We also find that loan applications decrease after provincial governments’ staggered extension of maternity leaves and that the decrease is more prominent when the expected motherhood penalty is greater. The results are unlikely driven by credit supply channels.

Speaker Biography:

Wenlan Qian is Professor of Finance and Real Estate, and Ng Teng Fong Chair Professor in Real Estate at the NUS Business School. She is fellow of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economics Research, Luohan Academy at Alibaba Group, and the Homer Hoyt Weimer School of Advanced Studies in Real Estate and Land Economics. Currently, Wenlan Qian is editor of Real Estate Economics and associate editor of Financial Management.

Wenlan Qian's main research interests are household finance, real estate, digitization and FinTech, short sellers, financial intermediaries. She is the recipient of multiple prestigious external grants and has won the best paper awards at leading international conferences in finance and real estate. Her research is accepted for publication at top academic journals such as American Economic Review, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Management Science, Real Estate Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Review of Finance.

Wenlan Qian holds a PhD in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.