Parental leave and subsidized child care are prominent examples of family policies supporting the reconciliation of family life and labor market careers for mothers. In this paper, we combine different empirical strategies to evaluate the employment effects of these policies for mothers in...

Informal care by close family members is the main pillar of most longterm care systems. However, due to demographic ageing the need for long-term care is expected to increase while the informal care potential is expected to decline. From a budgetary perspective, informal care is often viewed as...

We evaluate the labor market and distributional effects of an increase in the early retirement age (ERA) from 60 to 63 for women. We use a regression discontinuity design which exploits the immediate increase in the ERA between women born in 1951 and 1952. The analysis is based on the German...

The employment behavior of mothers is strongly influenced by labor market regulations and certain institutional arrangements, which both vary greatly across European countries. Using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) 1994-2001 for Denmark, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, which...

In this paper we develop a structural model of female employment and fertility which accounts for intertemporal feedback effects between the two outcomes. We identify the effect of financial incentives on the employment and fertility decision by exploiting variation in the tax and transfer...

Germany introduced a new mandatory insurance for long-term care in 1995 as part of its social security system. It replaced a system based on means tested social welfare. Benefits from the long-term care insurance are not means tested and depend on the required level of care. The insurance...

We present quasi-experimental evidence on the employment effects of an unprecedented large increase in the early retirement age (ERA). Raising the ERA has the potential to extend contribution periods and to reduce the number of pension beneficiaries at the same time, if employment exits are...

In Germany, individuals in need of long-term care receive support through benefits of the long-term care insurance. A central goal of the insurance is to support informal care provided by family members. Care recipients can choose between benefits in kind (formal home care services) and benefits...

The gender wage gap is a persistent labor market phenomenon. Most research focuses on the determinants of these wage differences. We contribute to this literature by exploring a different research question: if wages of women are systematically lower than male wages, what are the distributional...

Estimating labor supply functions using a discrete rather than a continuous specification has become increasingly popular in recent years. On basis of the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) I test which specification of discrete choice is the appropriate model for estimating labor supply: the...