Trends toward later and less marriage and childbearing in East Asia have been even more pronounced than in the West. At the same time, many other features of East Asian families have changed very little. We review recent research on trends in a wide range of family behaviors in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. We also draw upon a range of theoretical frameworks to argue that trends in marriage and fertility reflect tension between rapid social and economic change and limited change in family expectations and obligations. We discuss how this tension may be contributing to growing socioeconomic differences in patterns of family formation. This focus on East Asia extends research on the second demographic transition in the West by describing how rapid decline in marriage and fertility rates can occur in the absence of major changes in family attitudes or rising individualism.

This article explores the relationship between economic potential and rates of entry into marriage and cohabitation. Using data from the 1990 census and the 1980-1992 High School and Beyond (Sophomore Cohort), we developed a method for explicitly estimating five time-varying measures of earnings potential. The analyses of union formation are based on an intergenerational panel study of parents and children, to which our measures of earnings potential were appended. The results indicate that all five measures of earnings potential strongly and positively influence the likelihood of marriage for men, but not for women. Earnings potential does not affect entry into cohabiting unions for either men or women.

In Japan, unlike in most other industrialized societies, the decline in marriage rates has been most pronounced among highly educated women. Theoretical interpretations of this distinctive pattern of change have typically emphasized increasing economic independence for women and reductions in the gains to marriage. In this paper, the authors develop and evaluate an alternative explanation that emphasizes women's continued dependence on men's economic resources and decline in the relative supply of highly educated men. Using data from four rounds of the Japanese National Fertility Survey, the authors decompose the observed decline in marriage rates into changes in the propensity to marry and changes in the educational composition of the marriage market. Results indicate that change in the availability of potential spouses accounts for one-fourth of the decline in marriage among university-educated women and explains a substantial proportion of the growing educational differences in marriage. The conclusion is that the relatively large decline in marriage among highly educated Japanese women likely reflects both increasing economic independence and continued economic dependence on men.

I use data from a large nationally representative survey to examine the relationship between women's educational attainment and the timing of first marriage in Japan. The results indicate that later marriage for highly educated women primarily reflects longer enrollment in school, that university education is increasingly associated with later and less marriage, and that the trend toward later and less marriage is occurring at all levels of educational attainment. These findings are consistent, albeit weakly, with the argument that higher education should be negatively associated with marriage only in countries in which gender relations make it particularly difficult for women to balance work and family.

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