Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Title: On the Trends of Technology, Family Formation, and Women’s Time Allocation
Author-Name: Sagiri Kitao
Author-Email: sagiri.kitao@gmail.com
Author-Name: Kanato Nakakuni
Author-Email: nakakunik@gmail.com

Classification-JEL: D10, E10, J10, O11
Keywords: Fertility, Marriage, Home Production, Women’s Time Allocation,
Skill-biased Technological Change, Gender-biased Technological Change, Japan.


Abstract: Advanced economies have experienced a sharp decline in fertility and marriage
rates over the past several decades, alongside rising educational attainment and
substantial shifts in women’s time allocation. To investigate the forces behind these
trends, we develop a quantitative general equilibrium model with endogenous marriage, fertility, 
educational investment, and women’s time use. The model incorporates factor-neutral, skill-biased, and gender-biased technological change, which
jointly determine the wage structure and the trade-offs households face. Calibrating the model to Japan, we find that skill- and gender-biased technological change
jointly account for about 30% of the decline in fertility between 1970 and 2020, with
technologies favoring female labor supply explaining most of this effect. These forces
operate through higher opportunity costs of childrearing and weaker incentives to
marry. Counterfactual experiments show that ignoring the joint determination of
education and time allocation leads to substantial misattribution of the drivers of
fertility decline. Together, the results demonstrate that understanding long-run demographic change requires a unified framework that integrates these interconnected
household decisions.




Note: 
Length: 55
Creation-Date: 2026-03
Revision-Date:
File-URL: https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp735
File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:CRCTR224_2025_735