Housing booms and shirking

Quanlin Gu, Jia He, Wenlan Qian and Yuan Ren

Journal of Urban Economics, 2025, vol. 149, issue C

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of housing wealth shocks on workplace shirking. We use the type and actual time stamps of credit card transactions to detect non-work-related behavior during work hours. After a one-percentage-point increase in house prices, employed homeowners experienced a fast and persistent increase by 3.8 % per month in their propensity to use work hours to attend to personal needs. The post-shock response is more pronounced among homeowners with a greater wealth increase, with poorer career potential, or for occupations with higher monitoring costs.

Keywords: Labor supply; Shirking; Effort; Wealth effect; Housing wealth; Incentive cost; Productivity; Credit card; Household finance; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 E21 G21 J22 R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119025000580
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:juecon:v:149:y:2025:i:c:s0094119025000580

DOI: 10.1016/j.jue.2025.103793

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Urban Economics is currently edited by S.S. Rosenthal and W.C. Strange

More articles in Journal of Urban Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().