Factors of Late Marriage : A Survival Analysis of Life Courses for Marriage in Japan

Recent studies on the declining fertility rate of Japanese women have revealed that a considerable part of this can be explained by deferral of marital timing, as well as a declining fertility rate among married couples. In this paper, a possibility is demonstrated that late marriage is in part due to the adversity that the Japanese young must face after their educational career. In fact, the payback of education is not significantly good enough even for the highly educated, as a result of the seniority wage system in Japan. Additional evidence shows that those with no experience at living apart from their parents, that is with possible family support, tend to be able to marry earlier. This suggests that those without family support have more difficulties to marry.