Over the last decades many OECD countries introduced parental leave regulations in order to counteract low and decreasing birth rates. In general, these regulations aim at making parenthood more attractive and more compatible with a working career, especially for women. The recent German...

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...

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,...

Increasing long-term care demand raises the need of high quality care in nursing homes. This study analyses whether higher prices have a causal effect on quality of care in Swiss nursing homes and assesses the extent of cross-subsidization between different price components. We use...

We study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on domestic violence against women in Germany in 2020. The analysis draws on three data sources: (1) longitudinal administrative data on the volume of help requests to helplines, shelters and counselling services, (2) cross-sectional survey data...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the German Minimum Legal Drinking Age in reducing excessive drinking and alcohol-related hospital stays. We add to previous studies by looking at a considerably earlier cutoff at age 16, when teenagers in Germany gain legal access to beer, wine, and...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of a spouse's health shock on own risk attitudes. A spouse's health shock (i.e., the occurrence of a severe disease) can influence own expectations about the probability of falling ill. Moreover, an indisposition of the spouse, which may...

This paper is the first to estimate the causal effect of local human capital stock on individual adiposity and adds to the existing literature on estimating human capital externalities at the neighborhood level. We explore the possible causal pathways that college-educated neighbors exert on...

Growing long-term care (LTC) needs represent a major challenge for our ageing societies. Understanding how utilization patterns of different types of care are influenced by LTC policies or changes in the population composition such as age patterns or health can provide helpful insight on how to...

Informal caregivers provide valuable services to elderly persons with long-term care needs, but the consequences of caregiving on caregivers are not yet fully understood. This paper illustrates the interrelation between caregiving and caregivers’ labour force participation, cognitive ability,...