Title: From Firms to Homes: Coworker Networks, Earnings Exposure, and Housing_Purchases
Speaker: Guangli Lu, Assistant Professor, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)
Time: 10:00-11:30, May 22, 2026 (Friday)
Venue: Room 1008, Mingde Business Building (Zhongguancun Campus)
Language: English/Chinese
ABSTRACT:
This paper studies the implication of workplace networks on the housing market, using a unique employer branch–employee–residence–housing transaction linked panel for Massachusetts (2006–2023) constructed by linking LinkedIn work histories to property transactions and residential records covering both owners and renters. Home purchases comove strongly within branches: controlling for sorting and shared firm-level shocks with occupation-year and company-year fixed effects, an employee’s home purchase probability increases by over 20% of the sample mean following one additional coworker’s purchase in the last three years. Exploiting the post-2019 shift to remote work, we confirm social interaction as the key mechanism: within firm-years, the coworker effect declines significantly for remote-suitable occupations post-pandemic, with no significant trend before the pandemic. The network’s influence extends beyond the current firm, as purchases by out-of-city former coworkers also predict home purchases. Crucially, the network transmits information about economic fundamentals: employees buy more when their employers expand and less when employer risk increases, and the performance of a former coworker’s current firm also predicts an employee’s purchase, indicating cross-firm transmission. By transmitting firm-level shocks to the housing decisions of current employees and their former coworkers, workplace networks act as an important micro-level channel that propagates local economic shocks to the housing market.
SHORT BIOGRAPHY:
Guangli Lu graduated from the Department of Finance at the University of British Columbia and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Finance at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. His research interests include innovation, industrial policy, real estate markets and household finance, and labor finance. His papers have won the Masahiko Aoki Best Paper Award and the Labor-Finance Group Best Paper Award.