ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Aging and Public Health
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Costs of Caring for Older AdultsView all 5 articles
Unexpected Costs: The impact of Long-Term Care Insurance on Housing Prices
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Geographical Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
- 2Zhejiang Economic Information Center, hangzhou, China
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China's accelerated demographic aging has intensified scholarly interest in the institutional design and socio-economic impacts of long-term care policies. Using panel data on Chinese cities from 2003 to 2022, this study investigates the impact of the Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) policy on regional housing prices. Employing a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) approach and multiple robustness checks, we find that LTCI significantly increased housing prices in pilot cities. In-migration of the elderly is a key mechanism through which LTCI influences housing prices, as improved healthcare accessibility and enhanced living environments in pilot cities significantly attract older adults and, in turn, increase local housing demand. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact is more pronounced in eastern regions, in areas with better environmental quality, and in cities offering home-based care services, while no significant differences are observed between pilot types. These findings provide important empirical evidence for assessing the secondary economic impacts of elderly care policies.
Keywords: long-term care insurance, Housing prices, Elderly migration, Difference-in-differences, Aging policies
Received: 09 Sep 2025; Accepted: 29 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yang, WEN, Du and Hu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zhiding Hu, zdhu@re.ecnu.edu.cn
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