Having a child out of wedlock used to be associated with shame and scorn. This is mostly not the case anymore in the western world. Therefore, freed from social sanctions, single motherhood has become an additional family-choice alternative for women, along with marriage and childlessness. Yet,...

Having a child out of wedlock used to be associated with shame and scorn. This is mostly not the case anymore in the western world. Therefore, freed from social sanctions, single motherhood has become an additional family-choice alternative for women, along with marriage and childlessness. Yet,...

This paper analyzes whether immigrant families facing credit constraints adopt a family investment strategy wherein,upon arrival,an immigrant spouse invests in host country-specific human capital while the other partner works to finance the family's current consumption. Using data for West...

This paper analyzes whether immigrant families facing credit constraints adopt a family investment strategy wherein,upon arrival,an immigrant spouse invests in host country-specific human capital while the other partner works to finance the family’s current consumption. Using data for West...

Increasing mothers' labor supply is a key policy challenge in many OECD countries. Germany recently introduced a generous parental benefit that allows for strong consumption smoothing after childbirth and, by taking into account opportunity costs of childbearing, incentivizes working women to...

This paper evaluates the impact of a massive expansion of after-school programs (ASPs) on the labor market participation of mothers with primary school children in the West German context of relatively low full-time employment rates. Using an instrumental variables approach we exploit regional...

This study analyzes the effect of fathers' parental leave-taking on the time fathers spend with their children and on mothers' and fathers' labor supply. Fathers' leave-taking is highly selective and the identification of causal effects relies on within-father differences in leave-taking for...

Child labor is a matter of international concern. This paper examines the effect of a program that extended the length of a school day from four to six or eight hours in Mexico, on school enrollment, time spent on schooling activities, and child labor of children aged 7 to 14. To identify the...

Using a uniquely assembled panel dataset, we estimate the impact of neighborhood and peer effects on female labor supply. Nonrandom sorting and unobserved heterogeneity at the individual and neighborhood levels make recovering these impact parameters more complicated in the absence of...

The 2008 alimony reform in Germany considerably reduced post-marital and caregiver alimony. We analyze how individuals adapted to these changed rulings in terms of labor supply, the intra-household allocation of leisure, and marital stability. We use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and...