Health expenditures in Germany - as in almost all industrialized countries - grow more rapidly than the gross domestic product. Since a large portion of German health expenditures is financed by non-voluntary health premiums proportional to personal wages and collected by social health...

This paper studies the causal effect of giving first birth and how that effect changes by the 2007 reform in parental benefits in Germany. We further investigate how the reform affects the selection of women into motherhood and how that selection effect affects labor market outcomes. A large...