Over the last decades fertility rates have decreased in most developed countries, while female labour force participation has increased strongly over the same time period. To shed light on the relationship between women's fertility and employment decisions, we analyse their transitions to the...

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...

In this paper, we examine the heterogeneous treatment effects of a universal child care (preschool) program in Germany by exploiting the exogenous variation in attendance caused by a reform that led to a large staggered expansion across municipalities. Drawing on novel administrative data from...

This paper estimates the effects of cohort size on wages, employment and work time for workers in Germany. The empirical findings suggest that male workers with medium and high degrees of occupational specialization who were born at the peak of the baby boom earn at least 5.3% lower wages than...

In Germany we observe a decline in regular employment and an increase in atypical forms of employment. Especially marginal part-time employment which is characterized by lower tax rates and lower social security contributions increased substantially after a reform in 2003 made this type of...

Using two data sets derived from German administrative data, including a linked employer-employee data set, we investigate the cyclicality of worker and job flows.The analysis stresses the importance of two-sided labour market heterogeneity in this context, taking into account both observed and...

The aggregate average unemployment rate in a given country is essentially the result of individual workers' transitions between the three core labor force states, employment, unemployment, and inactivity. The dynamics of these transitions depend both, on individual duration in a particular state...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

This study presents credible estimates for the causal effect of a variation in obesity on employment. By exploring random assignment of a weight loss intervention based on monetary rewards, I provide convincing evidence that weight loss positively affects the employment prospects of obese women...