Wenqi Lu

Declining fertility rates pose social and economic challenges across many countries. A key driver is the strong gender-based division of labor within households, rooted in traditional gender norms that assign primary childcare duties to women regardless their education or career prospects. This unequal division of labor lowers fertility intentions through two mechanisms—the child penalty associated with motherhood and the disutility arising from perceived unfairness in domestic work. The degree of perceived unfairness depends on spouses’ gender role attitudes and the actual gap in time devoted to domestic tasks. The paper uses Japan as the empirical setting, drawing on its experience of low fertility and its wide gender gap in paid and unpaid work. The analysis highlights two central frictions shaping fertility decisions, gender norms that conflict with progressive women’s expectations and an overwork culture that limits men’s participation in childcare, thereby widening the domestic labor gap. Using a dynamic structural model, the study quantifies the effects of the child penalty and perceived unfairness mechanisms on fertility outcomes. Counterfactual analyses show that work–life balance policies raise fertility for most households, but a narrower division of domestic labor is required to increase fertility intentions among progressive women.

Joint experience between partners, or togetherness, are key benefits of marriage. Despite the importance, the allocation tradeoffs between togetherness and other household activities, and its relation to gender differences, remains limited understood. This paper captures time use and consumption allocation between spouses, with a particular focus on togetherness. The study shows that women place higher value on home-production, while men hold more bargaining power. This study also reveals a substitutable role between joint leisure time and expenditure. These patterns help explain the gender gap in time use and consumption within families.

This paper examines how removing identity-based institutional restrictions affects women’s economic participation by exploiting the 2013 repeal of a longstanding headscarf ban in Turkey. We combine two nationally representative surveys and use statistical matching and machine-learning models to predict women’s veiling status, to identify treatment effects by comparing veiled and non-veiled women’s labor market outcomes in a difference-in-differences framework. The repeal led to a significant rise in public sector employment among veiled women, driven by both higher employment rates and shifts away from self-employment and unpaid family work. In contrast, nonveiled women experienced a decline in public sector jobs, suggesting a substitution effect, with no evidence of reduced efficiency in the public sector after the repeal. Consistent with this pattern, effects are concentrated among more educated veiled women, the group most likely to qualify for public positions. We find no differential effects across regions with high and low veiling prevalence or ruling-party vote shares, suggesting that institutional access, rather than local acceptance or political favoritism, drives the response.

We examine the interhousehold heterogeneity in spousal allocations using a collective model where household members have distributional preferences over consumption, time away from work, and leisure. Most households exhibit spousal preference alignment in some domains but not in others, indicating narrow equity considerations. We then assess how many distributional preference types are needed to explain observed intra-household allocations. The presence of children emerges as the primary factor behind this heterogeneity. Our analysis integrates revealed preference principles with data on consumption and time use, supplemented by stated preference information from the Dutch LISS surveys.