Housing Wealth, Property Taxes, and Labor Supply among the Elderly

We investigate the relationship between housing wealth, property taxes, and elderly labor supply using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Survey spanning the recent boom/bust housing cycle. When combined with MSA-specific house price indexes, the data provide plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth, identified through within-MSA renter/homeowner comparisons. Our findings suggest that elderly households respond to variation in housing wealth and property taxes in the predicted opposing directions, that wealth influences labor supply to a lesser extent than factors like health and marital status, and that the effect of housing wealth on labor supply varies by gender and age.