This volume was prepared by Jens Ruhose while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes four self-contained chapters that contribute to the understanding of the...

This paper focuses on the structural relationship between family building and upward mobility. Typically this relationship is analyzed for women only, while we include men as well. With new patterns of intimate partnerships and non-traditional families, on the one hand, and a changing labor...

Using retrospective career life-history data from West Germany, the process by which individuals move into and out of self-employment is studied by separately examining the rates of movement into self-employment and family employment. A general framework of how the self-employment process...