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 -...

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...

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...

We apply a structural model of mothers' labor supply and child care choices to evaluate the effects of two childcare reforms in Germany that were introduced simultaneously in August 2013. First, a legal claim to subsidized child care became effective for all children aged one year or older....

This paper examines the added worker effect (AWE), which refers to the increase of labor supply of individuals in response to a sudden financial shock in family income, that is, unemployment of their partner. While previous empirical studies focus on married women's response to those shocks, I...

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...

To explore single mothers' labor market participation we analyze specific circumstances and dynamics in their life courses. We focus on the question which individual and institutional factors determine both professional advancement and professional descent. Due to dynamics in women's life course...

Previous studies report a wide range of estimates for how female labor supply responds to childcare prices. We shed new light on this question using a reform that raised the prices of public daycare. Parents respond by reducing public daycare and increasing childcare at home. Parents also reduce...

This paper investigates the effect of locus of control (LOC) on the length of mothers’ employment break after childbirth. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), duration data reveals that women with an internal LOC return to employment more quickly than women with an...

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...