We document day care enrolment gaps by family background for children under 3 in Germany. Research demonstrates that children of less-educated or foreign-born parents benefit most from day care, making it important to understand the causes of such enrolment gaps. Using a unique data set that...

In recent years, almost all children below school age in Western industrialized countries have some experience of attending day care institutions. However, the age at which children enter day care and therefore the overall time spent in day carevaries substantially. We investigate the potential...

Economic theory predicts market failure in the market for early childhood education and care (ECEC) due to information asymmetries. We empirically investigate information asymmetries between parents and ECEC professionals in Germany, making use of a unique extension of the German Socio-Economic...

We estimate effects of center-based care on parenting activities using time use data for Germany. Our estimates imply that center-based care reduces the overall time that parents spend with the enrolled child, but has only small negative effects on time spent doing activities together....

Children with lower socioeconomic status (SES) tend to benefit more from early child care, but are substantially less likely to be enrolled. We study whether reducing behavioral barriers in the application process increases enrollment in child care for lower-SES children. In our RCT in Germany...

There is a well-known gender difference in time allocation within the household, which has important implications for gender differences in labor market outcomes. We ask how malleable this gender difference in time allocation is to culture. In particular, we ask if US immigrants allocate tasks...

We estimate the impact of parental health on adult children’s labor market out- comes. We focus on health shocks which increase care dependency abruptly. Our estimation strategy exploits the variation in the timing of shocks across treated families. Empirical results based on Austrian...

Identifying essential and frontline workers and understanding their characteristics is useful for policymakers and researchers in targeting social insurance and safety net policies in response to the COVID-19 crisis. We develop a working definition that may inform additional research and policy...