This research explores how different parental leave reforms in West Germany impacted on the time mothers and fathers in couples spent on child care. I investigate indirect effects through mothers’ labor market return decisions more in detail than previous studies and also examine potential...

German family policy underwent a reform in 2007, when the new instrument of "Elterngeld" replaced the previous "Erziehungsgeld". The transfer programs differ in various dimensions. We study the effects on the labor supply of young mothers, by comparing behavior before and after the reform. We...

"In contrast to unemployment, the effect of non-participation and parttime employment on subjective well-being has much less frequently been the subject of economists' investigations. In Germany, many women with dependent children are involuntarily out of the labor force or in part-time...

Many countries are currently expanding access to child care for young children. But are all children equally likely to benefit from such expansions? We address this question by adopting a marginal treatment effects framework. We study the West German setting where high quality center-based care...

This paper investigates the association between maternal life satisfaction and the developmental functioning of two- to three-year-old children as well as the socio-emotional behavior of five- to six-year-old children. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which allows...

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...

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...

Different empirical studies suggest that the structure of employment in the U.S. and Great Britain tends to polarise into "good" and "bad" jobs. We provide updated evidence that polarisation also occurred in Germany since the mid-1980s until 2008. Using representative panel data, we show that...

Several studies have shown that income inequality has risen in Germany until 2005. Less focus was put on the rise of earnings inequality which continued to rise until 2010. We distinguish different groups in the labour market with respect to working-time, gender and region by exploiting data...

Extending working life is an objective for many nations. However, the UK government has recently reported only modest improvement “compared to many nations”. A comparison of European, Labour Force Surveys show that Germany has reversed early retirement much faster than the UK since 2003....