Women's changing work arrangements, career paths, and marital fertility in Japan

By drawing upon birth history data gleaned from the 2007 and 2010 rounds of the National Survey on Work and Family (NSWF), we estimate the relationship between the married female worker's use of the childcare leave scheme and her hourly wage, and then evaluate the impact of her predicted hourly wage upon her probability of proceeding from parity 0 to parity 1, as well as from parity 1 to parity 2. We find that married Japanese women working full-time, who took advantage of childcare leave, earned considerably higher hourly wages than their part-time counterparts. However, the higher predicted hourly wage lowered the probability of having first two children. This implies that the opportunity cost of having children is greater than the income effect for full time workers. In comparison with full-time workers, married women working part-time show much lower probabilities of having first two children.