This paper studies the effect of child care provision on family structure. We present a model of a marriage market with positive assortative matching, where in equilibrium the poorest women stay single. Couples have to decide on the number of children and spousal specialization in home...

Why are better educated and more risk-friendly persons more mobile across regions? To answer this question, we use micro data on internal migrants from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 2000–2006 and merge this information with a unique proxy for region-pair-specific cultural distances...

Many governments have banned strikes in public transportation. Whether this can be justified depends on whether strikes endanger public safety or health. We use time-series and cross-sectional variation in powerful registry data to quantify the effects of public transit strikes on urban...

Public child care is expected to assist families in reconciling work with family life. Yet, empirical evidence for the relevance of public child care to maternal employment is inconclusive. We exploit the introduction of a legal claim to a place in kindergarten in Germany, which was contingent...

Keeping up with rapid technological change necessitates constant innovation. Successful innovation depends on both incumbent workers’ knowledge, based on experience, and knowledge about the latest technologies, along with the skills needed to implement them. Both of these knowledge-based...

What role does affordable and widely available public child care play for fertility? We exploit a major German reform generating large temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three. Our precise and robust estimates on birth register data reveal that...

This paper investigates how group membership and competition among trustors interact with trust and trustworthiness in a laboratory one-shot trust game. To analyze these effects, we apply a 2x2 design. We induce group membership by letting subjects play coordination games with clear focal...

What is the role of politics in shaping attitudes about appropriate roles for women in the family and the compatibility of work and motherhood? In this paper we argue that the German separation and later reunification produced a natural experiment to address this question. During the divided...

Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One...

We document the spatial diffusion of Friedrich Froebel’s radical invention of kindergartens in 19th-century Germany. The first kindergarten was founded at Froebel’s birthplace. Early spatial diffusion can be explained by cultural proximity, measured by historical dialect similarity, to...