Germany has the lowest birth rate among all OECD countries. To encourage fertility,the federal government has recently introduced a set of reforms that led to a substantialexpansion of public child care for under three year old children. Using administrativecounty-level data, we exploit...

We investigate the impact of a compulsory schooling reform on marriage market matching using a regression discontinuity design. Our results imply that the formally gender-neutral educational reform has asymmetric impacts for men and women, owing to the pervasive marital age gap and the birthdate...

Contrary to standard microeconomic principles, it is by now well understood that income is not fungible. For example, the label of a government transfer can induce individuals to make expenditure decisions that are skewed towards the label. In this paper, we show that child benefits are...

Empirical literature has found evidence in favour of household bargaining models.In contrast to earlier tests that are limited to assignable private goods, we use childpreference data in order to extend the empirical evidence on household bargaining topublic household goods. In the empirical...

This paper explores the implications of gender-based income taxation in a noncooperative model of household behavior. In a first step, we show how gender-based taxes can act as Pigou taxes and correct the externality induced by a non-cooperative household equilibrium. We find that the first-best...