directly compare a parallel situation, where both the husband and the wife each lost a parent. In this case, we would be able to compare the same individuals' labor supply responses when losing their own parent and when losing the spouse's parent. However, because respondents to our survey were quite young when their parents died, there are few households for which this is the case. To make the samples in the vertical and cross analyses as comparable as possible, we confine the sample in the vertical analysis to married couples only, since a prerequisite for the cross analysis is that respondents have a spouse.

Table 4 shows the regression results for the test of the unitary model. Due to space limitations, we only report the results in which the reference year is one year before their parents died. Column (2), which shows the results of the vertical analysis for married women, indicates that, as in the baseline results in Table 2, if a woman receives an inheritance this lowers the probability that she will continue to work. On the other hand, the cross analysis in column (4) shows that if the husband receives an inheritance, this has no significant impact on the probability that the wife will continue to work. In this context it is interesting to note that the average inheritance of husbands in column (4) is about 13.23 million yen, which is almost twice the amount of wives' average inheritance in column (2) of about 7.70 million yen. The fact that there is no significant change in the probability that wives will work even when household wealth increases by a substantial amount when the husband's parent dies implies that there is no support for the unitary model.

Next, columns (5) to (12) show the results when the inheritance amount is included in the regression. As in Table 3, the results of the vertical analysis in column (10) show that the size of the inheritance has a non-linear effect on the likelihood that women will work. In contrast, the results in column (12) for the cross analysis again show that if the husband receives an inheritance this has no significant effect on the probability that the wife will work.

In sum, while we find that receiving an inheritance has a negative effect on the probability that women will work when they receive an inheritance when one of their parents passes away, we find no evidence of a decline in the probability that women will work when their husband receives an inheritance, meaning that we find no support for the unitary household model. This implies that who receives an inheritance – the wife herself or the husband – is important for wives' labor supply decision.

## 4 Conclusion

Using panel-structured microdata for Japan, this study examined the effect of wealth on individuals' labor supply by exploiting inheritance receipts as an exogenous change in wealth. The estimation results showed that while the probability that men worked did not change in response to receiving an inheritance, the probability that women worked did decrease when they received an inheritance despite the fact that women tended to receive smaller inheritances than men. We further found that the size of the inheritance had a non-linear effect on women's probability of working, reflecting that some women