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This study explores how changes in sibship composition associated with fertility decline may, in conjunction with entrenched family norms and expectations associated with specific sibship positions, impact marriage rates and further reduce fertility. We evaluate this possibility by focusing on Japan, a society characterized by half a century of below-replacement fertility and widely shared family norms that associate eldest (male) children with specific family obligations. Harmonic mean models allow us to quantify the contribution of changes in both marriage market composition with respect to sibship position and sibship-specific pairing propensities to the observed decline in marriage rates between 1980 and 2010. One important finding is that marriage propensities are lower for those pairings involving men and women whose sibship position signals a higher potential of caregiving obligations, especially only-children. Another is that changes in marriage propensities, rather than changing sibship composition, explain most of the observed decline in marriage rates. We also found that marriage propensity changes mitigate the impact of the changing sibship composition to some extent. However, the limited contribution of changing sibship composition to the decline in first-marriage rates provides little support for a self-reinforcing fertility decline via the relationship between changing sibship composition and marriage behavior., (Copyright © 2023 The Authors.)

Research on educational assortative mating has devoted much attention to educational expansion but has been less focused on a concurrent trend of importance: growing differentiation among higher education institutions. In this study, I examine whether the bifurcation between high- and low-tier institutions in the context of high participation in tertiary education may clarify the mixed evidence on educational homogamy trends across countries. I apply log-linear and log-multiplicative models to analyze trends in educational assortative mating in Japan, which is characterized by a clear, widely acknowledged hierarchy of institutional selectivity. I find that the odds of homogamy are higher among graduates of selective universities than among graduates of nonselective universities. Further, assortative mating trends among graduates of selective and nonselective universities have diverged in recent years. This latter finding perhaps reflects that with the more rapid increase in the share of female students enrolled in less selective institutions, their opportunities to "marry up" have decreased. Results point to the importance of the growing heterogeneity of institutional characteristics, which was obscured in earlier studies, for understanding the impact of educational assortative mating on economic inequality., (Copyright © 2022 The Author.)