Can Housing Policy Raise Birth Rates? Lessons from Federal Mortgage Programs During the Baby Boom

Previously circulated under the title "Did the Modern Mortgage Set the Stage for the U.S. Baby Boom?" The order of authors is alphabetical. We thank Connor Bopst and Nil Ozdemir for excellent research assistance, and Sheridan Fuller for graciously sharing his Vital Statistics data. We are grateful to Martha Bailey, Neil Bhutta, Leah Boustan, Kasey Buckles, Steve Davis, Adriana Lleras-Muney, and David Weil for helpful comments and suggestions. We acknowledge helpful comments from seminar participants at the 2025 NBER conference on fertility, MIT, Stanford University Hoover Institution, Princeton University OPR, University of Virginia Batten School, Johns Hopkins University, UCLA CCPR, UC-Santa Barbara, University of Notre Dame, and Claremont McKenna College. The analysis and conclusions set forth are those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or the Board of Governors or the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• February 5, 2025