In recent decades, changes in parents' attitudes towards the importance of spending time with children to optimise their future behaviour and cognitive development have greatly affected patterns of time allocation among both working and non-working parents in all developed countries. We compare...

Based on a structural model of fertility and female labour force supply with unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence, we evaluate the 2007 reform of parental leave benefits in Germany, which replaced a flat, means-tested benefit by a generous earnings-related transfer. The model predicts a...

We estimate a structural life-cycle model of fertility and female labour supply and use it to evaluate the effects of a number of key family policy measures based on data for Germany. Parental leave benefits, child benefits and subsidized childcare are found to have substantial fertility...

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...

Total employment in Germany is supposed to increase if people could realize their desired working hours. However, this back-of-the-envelope calculation overestimates the effect of loosening hours constraints, because even in a very flexible labor market there will exist hours restrictions for...

This paper investigates the relationship between personality traits and female labor force participation. While research on the role of cognitive skills for individual labor market success has a long tradition in economics, comparatively little is known about the channels through which...

Der Beitrag evaluiert die Wirkungen eines Betreuungsgeldes bei gleichzeitigem Ausbau der öffentlich geförderten Tagesbetreuung für Kinder im Alter von 13 bis 36 Monaten. Wir schätzen mit SOEP-Daten und unter Berücksichtigung partiell beobachtbarer Rationierungen im Betreuungsbereich ein...

This paper quantifies the life-cycle incidence of key family policy measures in Germany. The analysis is based on a novel dynamic microsimulation model that combines simulated family life-cycles for a base population from the 2009 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with a...

This paper studies the return-to-job of female employees after first birth based on exceptional longitudinal data from personnel records of a large German company. Given a very long maternity leave coverage, we investigate to what extent data available to management allow to predict the...

We analyse the determinants of dropout from secondary and vocational education in Germany using data from the Socio-Economic Panel from 2000 to 2007. In addition to the role of classical variables like family background and school achievements, we examine the effect of noncognitive skills. Both,...