Social norms have been put forward as prominent explanations for the changing labour supply decisions of women. This paper studies the intergenerational formation of these norms, examining how they affect subsequent female labour supply decisions, taking into account not only the early...

Social comparisons are an essential source of information about the self. Research in social psychology has shown individual variation in the tendency toward comparison with other people's opinions and abilities, raising the question of whether social comparisons are driven by psychological...

This paper reviews how income-support systems affect labour force participation in the UK. The UK's approach to social insurance is basic security, with modest, typically flat-rate, benefits; insurance-based benefits are relatively unimportant. Compared with the EU, the UK has high employment...

Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to hamper employment. This paper investigates the importance of incentives inherent in the tax-benefit system for the individual decision to take up work. Using German microdata over the period 1993 -...

This paper examines the impacts of recent Australian welfare to work reforms for low-income parents of school-aged children who had been in receipt of Parenting Payment – the main welfare payment for this group – for at least one year. Specifically, the reforms introduced a requirement to...

This research examines re-entry into the labour force for mothers after maternity leave. The empirical analysis focuses on the first twenty-two years of post-reunification Germany, using proportional hazards models. Results show that the re-entry into part-time employment is primarily affected...

The effects of childbirth on future labor market outcomes are a key issue for policy discussion. This paper implements a dynamic treatment approach to estimate the effect of having the first child now versus later on future employment for the case of Germany, a country with a long maternity...

Based on findings from high-income countries, typically economists hypothesize that having more children unambiguously decreases the time mothers spend in the labor mar- ket. Few studies on lower-income countries, in which low household wealth, informal child care, and informal employment...

This study investigates the employment and childcare use behaviour of migrant and non-migrant mothers in Germany. We use the waves 2007-2015 of the German Socio-Economic Panel study (SOEP), including the migrant samples M1 and M2, to identify significant associations between migration background...

We estimate the causal relationship between family size and labour market outcomes for families in low fertility and low female employment regime. Family size is instrumented using twinning and gender composition of the first two children. Among families with at least one child we identify the...