Abstract
The economics of fertility has produced many theoretical and empirical works since Becker's seminal article in 1960. Some tests support the theory and some others reject it. This paper aimed to test the relevance of the Chicago model and the Easterlin hypothesis in explaining the fertility movements in postwar Japan. The Chicago model the author of this paper used here explicitly expresses the different fertility response to changes in men's wages in households with and without a wife in employment, and the fertility response of a working wife to changes in women's wages. The results of the test seemed to be statistically good, but the conditions of sign expected a priori were not satisfied, so that the Chicago model was rejected. On the other hand, the Easterlin hypothesis was applied more successfully. Four variants of measures of relative economic status were adopted. One of them was the relative cohort size, the movement of which did not coincide with that of fertility. The other three variants of relative wage were considerably well fitted with fertility changes. According to these findings, fertility decline after the baby boom, subsequent low fertility and the second baby boom, and the recent decline in fertility, can be explained by the Easterlin hypothesis, that is, by the betterment or the worsening of intergenerational relative economic status. Further, it was suggested that an upswing in fertility in the near future could not be expected under the sustained low economic growth since the oil crisis.
