Age at motherhood in Japan

The paper analyzes factors influencing the age of motherhood in Japan, using both cross-sectional and time-series data. Both hazard rate and time series analyses support the hypothesis that better women's earning opportunities, as indicated by their educational attainments and relative pay, encourage Japanese women to marry and become mothers later in their lives. But both these analyses indicate that the trend toward later marriage and motherhood in Japan cannot be fully accounted for by improvements in women's educational attainments and earning opportunities, and the hazard analysis indicates that the strength of the trend increases with a woman's educational attainment.We are grateful to Shigemi Kono, former Director-General of the Institute of Population Problems, for providing us the aggregate data on the first birth probability, and the Population Problems Research Council of the Mainichi Newspapers for permitting us to use their survey data. We also thank Robert D. Retherford and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper, Kazuichiro Iizuka and Rikiya Matsukura for their research assistance, and the American Family Life Assurance Company of Japan for its financial support for the research.