Explore the vast range of titles available.

Explanations for the substantial decline in rates of marriage in East Asian countries often emphasize the role of rapid educational expansion for women in reducing the desirability of marriages characterized by a strong gender-based division of labor. Focusing on South Korea, we consider a very different scenario in which changing educational composition of the marriage market reduces the demographic feasibility of such marriages. Analyses of 1% microsamples of the 1990 and 2010 Korean censuses show that changes in the availability of potential spouses accounted for part of the decline in marriage rates over a period of 20 years (1985–1989 to 2005–2009) for highly educated women and less-educated men. We also show that growth in international marriages played a role in preventing an even more dramatic decline in marriage among low-educated men. These findings support the general relevance of marriage market mismatches in gender-inegalitarian societies and highlight the declining feasibility of marriage for low-educated men in such contexts. Findings also hint at important implications for inequality in a society such as Korea, where marriage remains a symbol of social success and is closely related to women’s economic wellbeing and men’s health and subjective well-being.

Trends toward later and less marriage and childbearing have been even more pronounced in East Asia than in the West. At the same time, many other features of East Asian families have changed very little. We review recent research on trends in a wide range of family behaviors in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. We also draw upon a range of theoretical frameworks to argue that trends in marriage and fertility reflect tension between rapid social and economic changes and limited change in family expectations and obligations. We discuss how this tension may be contributing to growing socioeconomic differences in patterns of family formation. This focus on East Asia extends research on the second demographic transition in the West by describing how rapid decline in marriage and fertility rates can occur in the absence of major changes in family attitudes or rising individualism.

Objective: This article documents trends in the educational gradient in marriage in Japan and evaluates the mechanisms underlying those trends by drawing on two broad theoretical frameworks emphasizing gender revolution and labor market bifurcation. Background: Efforts to explain reversal of the negative educational gradient in women's marriage have been limited in both theoretical scope and geographical focus. Distinctive features of the Japanese context allow us to shed new light on multiple sources of change in marriage behavior. Method: The authors apply the harmonic-mean two-sex marriage model to person-period data for men and women to investigate the changes in marriage rates by educational attainment and by specific educational pairings during the period 1988 to 2015. Our focus on changes in patterns of educational pairing facilitates the evaluation of predictions from the two broad theoretical frameworks. Results: The analyses showed that the negative educational gradient in women's first marriage disappeared by 2005 and that a positive gradient emerged after 2009. This change was brought about by a combination of decline in the marriage rates of less-educated women and an increase in the marriage rates of highly educated women. The former was the result of declining educational homogamy, whereas the latter was due to a rise in female educational hypogamy. In contrast, the educational gradient for men remained positive throughout the time period examined. Conclusion: Our study provides the first evidence of a positive educational gradient in women's marriage in Japan and provides empirical evidence consistent with expectations derived from two different, but interrelated and potentially reinforcing, theoretical frameworks.

In this study, we examine relationships of unemployment and nonstandard employment with fertility. We focus on Japan, a country characterized by a prolonged economic downturn, significant increases in both unemployment and nonstandard employment, a strong link between marriage and childbearing, and pronounced gender differences in economic roles and opportunities. Analyses of retrospective employment, marriage, and fertility data for the period 1990–2006 indicate that changing employment circumstances for men are associated with lower levels of marriage, while changes in women's employment are associated with higher levels of marital fertility. The latter association outweighs the former, and results of counterfactual standardization analyses indicate that Japan's total fertility rate would have been 10 % to 20 % lower than the observed rate after 1995 if aggregate- and individual-level employment conditions had remained unchanged from the 1980s. We discuss the implications of these results in light of ongoing policy efforts to promote family formation and research on temporal and regional variation in men's and women's roles within the family.

Objective This study examines how relationships between nonstandard employment (NSE) and subjective well‐being (SWB) differ by gender in Japan, paying particular attention to employees' motivation for engaging in NSE, their marital status, and their spouses' employment status. Background The expansion of nonstandard work is a gendered phenomenon that has contributed to increasing economic uncertainty and insecurity and may have differential implications for the SWB of men and women. Japan's rapid increase in nonstandard work, rigid labor market, and strong gender norms provide a valuable context in which to investigate the interrelationships between NSE, gender, and SWB. Method Fixed effects regression models with data from the Keio Household Panel Survey, a panel survey of a nationally representative sample of men and women, were used. Results Involuntary nonstandard work was associated, on average, with significantly lower SWB for both men and women. This pattern was held for men, regardless of marital status, whereas it was observed for unmarried women, but not for married women. Within married couples, no significant relationships between spouses' involuntary nonstandard work and respondents' own SWB were found. Conclusion The expansion of NSE in Japan has negative consequences for individuals' subjective life evaluation, except for married women, who shoulder domestic responsibilities and thereby types of employment may be less salient to SWB.

This study explores how changes in sibship composition associated with fertility decline may, in conjunction with entrenched family norms and expectations associated with specific sibship positions, impact marriage rates and further reduce fertility. We evaluate this possibility by focusing on Japan, a society characterized by half a century of below-replacement fertility and widely shared family norms that associate eldest (male) children with specific family obligations. Harmonic mean models allow us to quantify the contribution of changes in both marriage market composition with respect to sibship position and sibship-specific pairing propensities to the observed decline in marriage rates between 1980 and 2010. One important finding is that marriage propensities are lower for those pairings involving men and women whose sibship position signals a higher potential of caregiving obligations, especially only-children. Another is that changes in marriage propensities, rather than changing sibship composition, explain most of the observed decline in marriage rates. We also found that marriage propensity changes mitigate the impact of the changing sibship composition to some extent. However, the limited contribution of changing sibship composition to the decline in first-marriage rates provides little support for a self-reinforcing fertility decline via the relationship between changing sibship composition and marriage behavior.

One-person households are the most common type of household in Japan, but relatively little is known about the causes and potential consequences of the rise in solo living in young adulthood. I address two questions: What accounts for the rise in one-person households in young adulthood? How is solo living in young adulthood related to well-being? I use census data to evaluate how much of the growth in one-person households at ages 20-39 between 1985 and 2010 is explained by change in marital behavior and how much is explained by other factors. I then use data from the 2000-2010 rounds of the Japanese General Social Survey to examine whether and why men and women living alone differ from those living with others in terms of happiness and self-rated health. Results of the first set of analyses indicate that changes in marital behavior explain all of the increase in one-person households for men and three-fourths of the increase for women. Results of the second set of analyses indicate that those living alone are significantly less happy than those living with others, whereas the two groups do not differ with respect to self-rated health. The observed differences in happiness are not explained by differences in subjective economic well-being or social integration. The relatively small magnitude of estimated differences in happiness and health provides little evidence to suggest that the projected rise in one-person households is likely to play a significant role in contributing to lower levels of well-being among young adults in Japan.

In this study, we evaluate alternative hypotheses about the potentially harmful or beneficial effects of marriage on women's health and examine the factors underlying observed relationships between marriage and health. Using data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, an annual survey of a nationally representative sample of Japanese women (N = 1,610), our study advances current scholarship on marriage and health by focusing on a context characterized by a high degree of gender inequality. Results from models employing different approaches to the potential role of health-related selection into marriage consistently indicate that marriage is associated with better mental and physical health and that the lower levels of employment among married women play an important role in explaining this relationship. Our findings highlight the importance of considering how the specific pathways linking marriage and health may vary across societies with different gender and institutional contexts.

We provide an empirical foundation for research on the demography of loneliness at older ages. First, we use published life tables and data from the U.S.-based Health and Retirement Study for the period 2008–2016 to calculate lonely life expectancy for Americans aged 55 or older. Using Sullivan's method, we demonstrate pronounced differences in lonely life expectancy by sex, race/ethnicity, and educational attainment that correspond to well-established patterns of stratification in other dimensions of well-being. Next, we estimate models that decompose observed sex, racial/ethnic, and educational differences in three key health outcomes into the part explained (in a statistical accounting sense) by loneliness and the part accounted for by other factors. We find little evidence of an important role for loneliness in understanding disparities in mortality and the onset of physical disability and cognitive impairment among Americans aged 55 or older, net of several established correlates of health disparities. These descriptive findings provide an empirical foundation for continued development of a demography of loneliness at older ages in response to the anticipated growth in scientific and policy emphasis on loneliness and the fundamental life changes that have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Japan, unlike in most other industrialized societies, the decline in marriage rates has been most pronounced among highly educated women. Theoretical interpretations of this distinctive pattern of change have typically emphasized increasing economic independence for women and reductions in the gains to marriage. In this paper, the authors develop and evaluate an alternative explanation that emphasizes women's continued dependence on men's economic resources and decline in the relative supply of highly educated men. Using data from four rounds of the Japanese National Fertility Survey, the authors decompose the observed decline in marriage rates into changes in the propensity to marry and changes in the educational composition of the marriage market. Results indicate that change in the availability of potential spouses accounts for one-fourth of the decline in marriage among university-educated women and explains a substantial proportion of the growing educational differences in marriage. The conclusion is that the relatively large decline in marriage among highly educated Japanese women likely reflects both increasing economic independence and continued economic dependence on men.