In recent years, a great deal of attention has been paid to the relation between fertility, labor force participation and wages of married women in the more developed countries. In Japan as well, the tendency to the greater participation of married women in labor market has become prominent, while fertility has continued to decline just after the first oil crisis. Economists consider that there is a close relationship between those two phenomena. This issue has for long been the central concern of the so-called 'economics of fertility', particularly the new home economics, and abundant works, theoretical and empirical, have been accumulated so far. The purpose of this paper is, on the basis of these works, to build a simultaneous estimation model of fertility, child quality, wife's labor supply and female wage, and to test the applicability of this model using time-series data from postwar Japan. After reviewing the works along that line by Butz and Ward (1979), Cain and Dooley (1976), Fleisher and Rhodes (1979), and Kohl (1984), the model is built, and the concept of variables and data used here is explained. The model consists of four regression equations, and four endogenous and nine exogenous variables are identified. Calculations were carried out for annual data drawn from basic national sources over the period 1950-1983. All of equations yielded adequately satisfactory estimates, and four dependent variables were explained simultaneously and consistently with each other. This study implies that fertility and employment have generally been the alternative behavior for the Japanese women; that their behavioral choice has depended on economic conditions; and that the quantity and quality of children have been substitutes.
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