This paper explores how extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits targeted to older workers affect early retirement and social welfare. The trade-off of optimal UI between consumption smoothing and moral hazard requires accounting for the entire early retirement system, which often includes...

Public interest in the gender pay gap has risen significantly over the past years in Germany, but the size of the gender pay gap has barely changed. A comparison across European countries shows that a lower female labor force participation rate is associated with a smaller gender pay gap. The...

Women remain significantly underrepresented in the top decision-making bodies in the private sector. Over the past few years, increasingly more European countries have introduced statutory gender quotas to combat this underrepresentation. Other European countries have instead relied on voluntary...

Work and family life arrangements differed greatly between the east and west before German reunification in 1990. Since reunification, however, the employment rates of mothers with children requiring childcare have converged. This trend is accompanied by a growing approval of maternal...

While the gender pay gap between men and women in Germany remains at 18 percent, this figure is not the same for all employees. There are, for example, major differences by age. Beginning at age 30, the gender pay gap increases sharply and remains constantly high at 20 percent until retirement....

The gender care gap, i.e., the difference between the amount of unpaid care work-such as childcare and housework-performed between men and women is comparatively high in Germany: Women take on much more unpaid care work than men. This gap increases consistently when starting a family. At the...

Two traditional options for reforming Ehegattensplitting, the joint taxation of married couples with full income splitting, are de facto income splitting (Realsplitting) or individual taxation with a transferable personal allowance. However, these proposals do not significantly reduce the...

On average, mothers and fathers in Germany divide paid work and care work very unequally. Mothers often only work part time, which results in further gender inequalities in the labor market. A current analysis of data from the German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA) shows that the...

The average gender pay gap in Germany is 16 percent according to the most recent data. On the occasion of the 2025 Equal Pay Day, this Weekly Report using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data shows that considerable differences according to age and level of education are hiding behind this average...