Education and Marriage Decisions of Japanese Women and the Role of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act

Prompted by concordant upward trends in both the university advancement rate and the unmarried rate for Japanese women, this paper investigates whether the Equal Employment Opportunity Act (EEOA), which was passed in 1985, affected women’s marriage decisions either directly or via their decisions to pursue university education. To this end, we estimate a model that treats education and marriage decisions as jointly determined using longitudinal data for Japanese women. We find little evidence that the passage of EEOA increased the proportion of women who advance to university, but strong support for the proposition that it increased the deterrent effect of university education on marriage. Linda N. Edwards Ph.D. Program in Economics City University of New York Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 [email protected] Takuya Hasebe Dept. of Social Sciences Sophia University Tokyo, Japan [email protected] Tadashi Sakai Department of Economics Hosei University Tokyo, Japan [email protected]