Abstract: Currently, the researches related to human capital and housing price are centered around the macro field, mainly focusing on how the accumulation and promotion of urban human capital driving up urban housing prices and what reaction to the human capital brought by the housing prices. However, little research efforts have been made on the micro level, such as the impact of the rising housing price on the enterprise investment decisions on human capital. Based on the researches of the related literatures, this article sorts out several paths of the impact of housing prices on human capital investment, deals with the data of Chinese listed manufacturing enterprises from 2010 to 2014 with various models, and conducts an empirical analysis of the impact of housing price on the enterprise investment decisions on human capital from the three dimensions, i.e., the relative intensity, the absolute intensity and per capita investment intensity. The results show that there is a complicated relationship between enterprise human capital investment and housing price: the housing price is negatively affecting the human capital investment, the increase of housing price has a positive effect on it, but the comprehensive result is still negative. At the same time, the R&D investment can have a partial mediating effect in the relationship between the housing prices and the firms’ human capital investment.

Key words: housing price; human capital; investment decision; research and development