The Cost of Raising Children and Family Intentions and Desires: A Survey Experiment Approach Using Information Intervention

Fumiya Uchikoshi, Princeton University
Ryota Mugiyama, Gakushuin University

The cost of raising children has been the primary reason for the gap between desired and realized fertility in East Asia, one of the so-called “lowest low” fertility contexts. Meanwhile, empirical efforts to understand the relationship between the cost of education and fertility are largely correlational. In this study, we address this limitation by combining a survey experiment approach with information intervention, which allows researchers to identify causal evidence for a particular treatment we cannot change by exogenously changing perceptions of it. Using data from an online survey experiment targeting never-married young adults in Japan, our results reveal the following findings. First, respondents are more likely to overestimate the cost of education per child (defined by their estimates 25% higher than the actual average). Second, we do not find evidence for the causal effect of over- or under-estimation of the education cost on family intentions, except for the desired age of the first childbearing. Substantively, overestimating the cost of education by twice the actual average lowers the desired age by 0.35 years for those who are informed. These findings carry important theoretical and policy implications to advance our understanding of the cross-national variation in fertility levels across low fertility contexts.

Keywords: Fertility, Human Capital, Education, and Work, Families, Unions and Households, Data and Methods

See extended abstract.