A Quantitative Model of Non-Marriage and Fertility: Bargaining over Leisure

TL;DR

This paper develops a quantitative model incorporating leisure technology growth and intra-household bargaining to explain the decline in marriage and fertility, calibrated with Japanese data from 2019-2023.

Contribution

It introduces a unified model of marriage and fertility that accounts for leisure technology's impact, providing quantitative explanations for recent demographic shifts.

Findings

Leisure technology growth increases attractiveness of single life.

Model explains 21.1% of marriage decline and 73.1% of fertility decrease.

Calibrated with Japanese data from 2019-2023.

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 2019 and 2023, 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 21.1% of the decline in marriage and 73.1% of the decrease in fertility.