Demographic change is one of the greatest challenges faced by Germany as well as a large part of Europe today. One of the main drivers of this change is the low fertility level, often referred to as the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), since the early 1970s. Therefore, on the one hand, while the...

The labor-leisure distortion of a pay-as-you-go pension system can be reduced through a stronger tax-benefit link or Bismarck pension system. Distortions of the fertility decision can be reduced through the introduction of a stronger child-benefit or child pension system. Within our optimal...

We study the development of teenage fertility in East and West Germany using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) and from the German Mikrozensus. Following the international literature we derive hypotheses on the patterns of teenage fertility and test whether they are relevant in the...

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 examines the causal effects of a major change in the German parental leave benefits on fertility. I use the unanticipated reform of 2007 to assess how a move from a means-tested to an earnings-related benefit affects higher-order births. By using data from the Mikrozensus, I find that...

Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The paper outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one allowing...

Good forecasts for future fertility developments are of high importance in political planning, especially regarding measures in social insurance. Fertility is the main driver of demographic change, since small fertility rates lead to a shrinking population and together with decreasing mortality...

This contribution proposes a simulation approach for the indirect estimation of age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) and the total fertility rate (TFR) for Germany via time series modeling of the principal components of the ASFRs. The model accounts for cross-correlation and autocorrelation...

To assess whether earnings-dependent maternity leave positively impacts fertility and narrows the baby gap between high educated (high earning) and low educated (low earning) women, I exploit a major maternity leave benefit reform in Germany that considerably increases the financial incentives...

Numerous articles have looked at the connection between adverse birth outcomes (low birth weight or preterm birth) and an individual's later socioeconomic status. To this day very few studies have been conducted that specifically address how delivery and adverse birth outcomes affect families...