A Quantitative Model of Non-Marriage and Fertility
Bargaining over Leisure
Abstract
This paper introduces a new factor contributing to the decline in marriage and fertility: the growth of leisure technology. Over recent decades, high-income countries have experienced two notable shifts in household and family dynamics. First, there has been a significant decline in marriage rates and fertility. Second, time has increasingly been allocated to leisure activities. This paper presents a unified model of marriage and fertility, incorporating intra-household bargaining dynamics. The model, calibrated using data from Japan between 2018 and 2022, is employed to assess the impact of leisure technology growth on marriage and fertility during 2005-2009. The findings highlight that leisure technology growth makes single life relatively more appealing compared to marriage and parenthood. The model explains 22.0% of the decline in marriage and 65.8% of the decrease in fertility.
BibTeX citation
@unpublished{yanagimoto2024,
Title = {A Quantitative Model of Non-Marriage and Fertility:
Bargaining over Leisure},
Author = {Kazuharu Yanagimoto},
Note = {Working paper},
Year = {2024},
month = aug,
}