We analyse the impact of work-life balance policies enacted by the government of Japan on the share of time allocated by Japanese women to paid employment, home production and leisure on a typical working day. Using panel data and employing fixed effects to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity, we find that these policies have had some success in increasing married women’s share of time spent in paid employment. However, the increase in the share of time spent in paid employment is not largely compensated by cutting down the share of time spent in home production. This necessitates the need to cut down the share of time spent for leisure, implying a “double burden” of work for women. Further, work-life balance policies in married men’s firms do not appear to significantly influence their time allocation between various activities on a typical working day. We find that although work-life balance policies do not appear to influence the desirability of having a child for all women, they help women with children younger than six years raise the share of time spent in paid employment by largely cutting down their time allocation to home production.

我们分析了日本政府制定的工作与生活平衡政策对日本妇女在典型工作日分配给有偿就业，家庭生产和休闲的时间份额的影响。使用面板数据并采用固定效应来控制未观察到的个体异质性，我们发现这些政策在增加已婚妇女在有偿就业中所花费的时间份额方面取得了一些成功。但是，减少有偿工作所花时间的比例并不能在很大程度上抵消减少有偿工作所花时间的比例。这就需要减少休闲时间的比例，这意味着女性工作“双重负担”。进一步，已婚男子公司中的工作与生活平衡政策似乎并没有显着影响他们在典型工作日进行各种活动之间的时间分配。我们发现，尽管工作与生活平衡政策似乎并未影响所有妇女生育子女的意愿，但它们通过大幅减少她们的时间分配来帮助年龄在6岁以下的子女的妇女增加有薪就业的时间比例。家庭生产。