An important education reform in Germany reduced the duration of university preparatory schooling from 13 to 12 years, but left the curriculum unchanged. In the state of Saxony-Anhalt the reform was completed in 2007 with a double cohort of graduates, providing a natural experiment. We use...

This paper investigates the problem of an ``optimum population'' with respect to the age structure. Within a 3-period OLG model, with endogenous fertility and longevity, the optimal age structure, identified by number-dampened total utilitarianism, is generally failed in the laissez-faire...

Increasing mothers labor supply is a key policy challenge in many OECD countries. Germany recently introduced a generous parental benefit that allows for strong consumption smooth- ing after childbirth and, by taking into account opportunity costs of childbearing, incentivizes working women to...

In August 2013, two child care reforms have come into effect at the same time: First, a legal claim to formal child care has been introduced for all children aged one year or older. Second, a new benefit called Betreuungsgeld has been introduced that is granted to families who do not use public...

As the number of young children in daycare increases, people start to worry about the effect of early non-parental care. This is of special relevance as investments in the early periods of life are shown to be most important for a child’s long term development. Based on the German national...

This paper examines the effects of a major change in German parental transfer system on fertility. I use the largely unanticipated reform of 2007 as a natural experiment to assess how an earnings-dependent parental leave benefit effects higher-order fertility. Given the recent introduction, this...

This paper investigates the degree of monoposony power of German employers in different industries, using a semi-structural approach based on a dynamic model of monopsonistic competition. The empirical analysis is based on a linked employer-employee data set which allows us to control for...

We estimate the effects on wage and employment growth rates of the introduction and subsequent increases of the minimum wage in the main construction industry of Germany. Using a regional dataset constructed from individual employment histories, we exploit the spatial dimension and border...

On the basis of a structural labor demand model employment effects of a minimum wage are estimated from a single cross-sectional wage distribution. The main contribution of the paper is to relax restrictive functional form assumptions of earlier papers by introducing more flexible...

We provide an overidentification test for a nonparametric treatment model where individuals are allowed to select into treatment based on unobserved gains. Our test can be used to test the validity of instruments in a framework with essential heterogeneity (Imbens and Angrist 1994). The...