The Impacts of the Gender Imbalance on Marriage and Birth: Evidence from World War II in Japan

Erika Igarashi, University of Tokyo
Kota Ogasawara, Tokyo Institute of Technology

This study uses the unprecedented changes in the sex ratio due to the losses of men during World War II to identify the impacts of the gender imbalance on marriage market and birth outcomes in Japan. Using newly digitized prefecture-age-year-level information on marriage market outcomes from population census-based historical statistics in 1950 and 1955, we apply the difference-in-difference estimation strategy (DID) with the exogenous variation in the sex ratio from the wartime losses of men. As such we find that people who faced relative male scarcity were more likely to marry and divorce. The gender difference in the estimates suggests that men had a stronger bargaining position in the marriage market and intra-household fertility decisions than women. Under relative male scarcity, widowed women were less likely to remarry than widowed men. We also find that women’s bargaining position in the marriage market might not have improved throughout the 1950s. Our study shows that the shortage of men affected not only the marriage market but also the decision to give birth. Given the institutional changes in the abortion law after the war, marital fertility and stillbirth rates increased in the areas that suffered relative male scarcity. Previous studies show that relative male scarcity due to war raised the share of out-of-wedlock births in the cases of countries that experienced an increase in the share of out-of-wedlock births. By contrast, the share was considerably lower in postwar Japan. Despite this difference, we find a result consistent with those of previous studies, implying that the theoretical prediction of intra-household bargaining is robust in an economy in which marital fertility is dominant. This study contributes to the literature by providing suggestive evidence on the dynamic relationships between the gender imbalance and demographic changes as well as the gender-based differences in its effects.

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 Presented in Session 152. The Demographic Effects of Shocks, Stress and Economic Development