Long-term consequences of birth in an ‘unlucky’ year: evidence from Japanese women born in 1966

Abstract

This article explores the long-term consequence of a prevailing superstition regarding women who were born in 1966, a year of the fire horse, who were around 44 years of age in 2010. The findings indicate that ‘fire horse women’ are disadvantaged in some aspects such as divorce rates, educational attainment and their own and household level income, suggesting discrimination against fire horse women as a result of the superstition.

Keywords:

• gender
• fire horse
• superstition
• marriage
• cohort

JEL Classification:

• I31
• J11
• J12
• J16
• N35

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare for providing us with micro-data from the Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions. The views expressed in this article are completely personal.

Notes

¹ Previous studies picked up fire horse women by age (Yamada, 2013) or by birth in a fiscal year (Akabayashi, 2007) but this identification may not be accurate since we need to identify women born in a particular calendar year.

² A similar superstition based on the Chinese zodiac is found in other Asian countries but the empirical results are very mixed among a small number of studies. For example, Lee (2005) found horse year women were slightly less likely to be married in Korea. Wong and Yung (2005) did not find any difference between Dragon year and non-Dragon year cohort years, although the Dragon year cohort is believed to be ‘lucky’ and indeed the birth rate increases in Dragon years.

³ Except for the analysis on the economic status (income) shown in Tables 2 and 3, the basic sample size of ‘fire horse women’ is more than 3000 while that of the surrounding cohorts is more than 16 000. The survey was conducted in 228 864 households. For the analysis on the economic status, the sample size was smaller because the survey was conducted in only 26 115 households.

⁴ Yamada (2013) does not show those results and only focused on the marriage rate because he used the data until the year of 2000 when the fire horse women were still around 34 years old and the number of death separations and divorces were negligible.

⁵ Yamada (2013) is inconclusive in educational attainment due to the small sample size and Akabayashi (2007) found no difference using aggregate data.

⁶ There is no significant difference in the stock of saving between the two groups. But the data includes financial assets only and does not include nonfinancial (real) assets.