The Impact of Child-Rearing Environment on Fertility Behavior and Labor Participation of Women

摘要

The main objective of this paper is to examine how the level of public nursery provision as part of the child- rearing environment in urban areas will have influence on women's behavior towards childbearing and labor participation. We also examined the relation of mutual causality between women's fertility behavior and labor participation, which had not been demonstrated clearly in past studies. The method of covariance structure analysis is employed in this paper. In order to analyze three causal models, which are based on previous theories and empirical analysis, we use the 1995/1996 data of all Japanese cities.