Despite extensively examining the effects of family policies on marriage and fertility rates, previous research has paid little attention to the process of policy implementation and has implicitly assumed that individuals are fully aware of the policy information when making marital and fertility decisions. Challenging this assumption, we theorize policy awareness as an important mechanism for understanding the potential influence of family policies on individuals' marital intentions, an understudied yet crucial determinant of family formation behavior. In an experiment using a national survey of young unmarried individuals in Japan, respondents were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. The treatment group was informed about 17 Japanese family policy benefits, but most of the respondents knew none or only a few of these benefits. After exposure to the policy information, the treatment group had significantly higher marital intentions than the control group, which had similar baseline characteristics but no information exposure. Crucially, such positive effects were particularly pronounced among high-educated women and high- and low-educated men, reflecting the differentiated effects of policy awareness under Japan's traditional gender role norms. Overall, these findings highlight the pivotal role of policy awareness during the family formation process and contribute to the debate over whether and how family policies may influence different subpopulations.
Keywords: Family policy awareness; Gender norms; Japan; Marital intentions; Survey experiment.
Copyright © 2021 The Authors.