Research on the relationship between income and marriage has paid little attention to how income affects one’s decision to marry. This paper investigates the role of Japanese women’s own income to her marriage timing, intention to marry, and actions taken toward marriage. I find that as income increases, marriage occurs later. However, this is not due to the fact that they reduce incentives to marry when they become financially better off, as one theory predicts. Rather, her intention to marry is independent of income. I also find that income has nothing to do with activities to get married, particularly activities in finding marriage partners by those who do not seem to have a boyfriend. These findings suggest that in making a decision to marry, women’s income plays a role not as an ability to earn their living, but as something other that would interfere with marriage.
Prompted by concordant upward trends in both the university advancement rate and the unmarried rate for Japanese women, this paper investigates whether the Equal Employment Opportunity Act (EEOA), which was passed in 1985, affected women•s marriage decisions either directly or via their decisions to pursue university education. To this end, we estimate a model that treats education and marriage decisions as jointly determined using longitudinal data for Japanese women. We find little evidence that the passage of EEOA increased the proportion of women who advance to university, but strong support for the proposition that it increased the deterrent effect of university education on marriage.
日本で社会保険料の事業主負担の帰着に関する実証分析が少ない理由の一つとして，適切な自然実験となるような制度変更が無かったことが挙げられる。2000年に導入された介護保険制度では40歳以上の労働者についてのみ企業に保険料負担が課されるので，40歳以上と40歳未満の労働者の制度導入前後の賃金変化を比較することで，事業主負担が賃金低下という形で労働者に帰着していたかどうか確かめることができる。「賃金構造基本統計調査」の公刊データを用いた推計より，様々な要因をコントロールしたうえでも，40歳以上の男性労働者では，2000年以降，相対的な賃金低下が大きかったことが確かめられた。この賃金低下は大企業よりも中小企業において顕著に観察された。推計は誤差項の系列相関に配慮し，Bertrand et al.（2004）の提案する方法に基づいて行ったので，従来のDD推定に見られたような過大推定の危険はない。 但し，更に結果の頑健性について検討を行ったところ，40歳という年齢境界は必ずしも重要なわけではない可能性も示され，中高年層に見られた賃金低下が本当に新たに課された事業主負担によるものであったかどうかについては，本分析の枠組みからははっきりした結論が得られなかった。
Abstract In this study, based on longitudinal data, we investigate whether Japanese middle‐aged men and women become less likely to have a job and whether their sense of well‐being decreases when they have a family member who needs care. We find a consistent negative impact of having a family member who needs care on employment, but no impact on subjective health and life satisfaction. Further, the differences‐in‐differences ( DID ) estimation, based on both unmatched and matched data, shows that the Long‐Term Care Insurance ( LTCI ) introduced in 2000 did not mitigate the adverse impact on the probability of being employed.
For the last several decades, in most post-industrial countries, the market has played an increasingly important role in formulating social policies. However, wisdom and ingenuity are required to ensure an equitable and fair distribution of human services through the market. While the market identifies various human service needs in society, the pricing of these services may cause gaps in the quality of service between those who can and cannot afford them. Since the objective of social policy is to guarantee a minimum standard of living, poor quality is unacceptable, especially in the market for human services. In Managing the Human Service Market: The Case of Long-Term Care in Japan, Yoshihiko Kadoya proposes a model of long-term care in which services of poor quality are excluded, and utilizes the case of Japan, which introduced public Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) in 2000, as a good example of a country taking advantage of the market in providing human services. This well-organized book, which was originally the author’s doctoral dissertation, consists of nine chapters, in addition to the introductory and concluding chapters.
The Japanese Equal Employment Opportunity Act (EEOA) of 1985 aimed to reduce gender discrimination in the labor market, especially for career-oriented jobs. This paper investigates whether this act had an unanticipated effect on women’s marriage decisions. Using micro data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, we model women’s interrelated decisions on university education and whether to marry, focusing on whether women have married by age 32. Our results show a negative relationship between university education and marriage that is much greater for post-EEOA cohorts of women than for pre-EEOA cohorts, consistent with our hypothesis that the enhanced career opportunities associated with the EEOA stimulated women to delay or forgo marriage.
Based on panel data covering elderly people, we have examined how their decision on whether or not to retire is affected by the presence of a family member in need of care. Our major findings are: 1) the presence of a family member in need of care tends to inhibit other family members' participation in work; but, 2) patterns in which work participation is inhibited differ between men and women; the need to care for a family member affects males in full-time regular employment or engaged in sole proprietorship, whereas females who are non-regular and/or part-time employees are the most affected; and 3) no conclusive results were obtained as to whether the public elderly care system, introduced in 2005, has brought any changes to the work-inhibiting effects of family care needs. The public pension system and the mandatory age retirement rules have been the primary focus of attention in discussing factors inhibiting work participation among the elderly. However, it is also important to emphasize policy measures for alleviating the nursing burden of family caregivers as a way of promoting work participation among the elderly.
