  This study uses the unprecedented changes in the sex ratio due to the losses
of men during World War II to identify the impacts of the gender imbalance on
marriage market and birth outcomes in Japan. Using newly digitized census-based
historical statistics, we find evidence that men had a stronger bargaining
position in the marriage market and intra-household fertility decisions than
women. Under relative male scarcity, while people, especially younger people,
were more likely to marry and divorce, widowed women were less likely to
remarry than widowed men. We also find that women's bargaining position in the
marriage market might not have improved throughout the 1950s. Given the
institutional changes in the abortion law after the war, marital fertility and
stillbirth rates increased in the areas that suffered relative male scarcity.
Our result on out-of-wedlock births indicates that the theoretical prediction
of intra-household bargaining is considered to be robust in an economy in which
marital fertility is dominant.
