Abstract: China's birth rate has been on the decline in recent years, even after the introduction of a comprehensive two-child policy. In order to achieve high-quality economic development, alleviating the population crisis is an important problem to be solved urgently. To explore the impact of rising housing price on the birth rate, the panel data of 31 provincial administrative regions from 2010 to 2019 are used for empirical analysis with weighted least square method. The results show that rising housing price has a significant negative impact on the birth rate. An average increase of 1%in housing price leads to a drop in the birth rate of 0.13%to 0.22%. According to heterogeneity analysis results, the impact of rising housing price on the birth rate is dominated by crowding out effect in eastern provinces, and wealth effect in central and western provinces. Based on the above research results, we suggest curbing investment and speculative demand, giving preferential loans to people with rigid demand for housing purchases, and appropriately increasing the supply of land in eastern provinces in housing policy.

Key words: housing price, birth rate, crowding out effect, wealth effect, population aging, child birth policy