COVID-19, self-restraint at home, and pregnancy: evidence from Japan

ABSTRACT

When the first wave of COVID-19 hit Japan, the number of pregnancies dropped significantly compared to the same month last year. This paper examines the impact of the government’s request to remain at home and identifies the following two points: (i) government’s request for self-restraint reduced the number of pregnancies by five to eight percent; and (ii) the number of pregnancies in areas legally designated as requiring special precautions was significantly two to three percent lower than in other areas.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• pregnancy
• DID approach
• stay-home restrictions

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I18
• J13

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Luppi, Arpino, and Rosina (2020) reveal that people in several European countries were forced to change their family plans due to uncertainty about their future income.

² Yamamoto et al. (2020) show that the occurrence of COVID-19 issue affected people’s mental health through increased anxiety, etc. See also Yamamura and Tsutsui (2020) that analysed the impact of COVID-19 on mental health in Japan, using the DID approach.

³ Strictly speaking, the self-restraint, also known as mild (half) lockdown, imposed by the Japanese government is different from the lockdown with penalties imposed by other countries.

⁴ The data is available from https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/newpage_15670.html (last access date, 28 December 2020).

⁵ Codagnone et al. (2020) target Spain, Italy, and the UK, revealing that future economic uncertainty associated with the lockdown affects people’s behaviour.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI [17H00988,17H02533,20K01693].