This dissertation consists of five distinct empirical papers covering two large areas of research that are rather independent from each other: the economics of ageing and the economics of innovation. The first three chapters cover the impact of intergeneration interaction on the parents of adult...

It is recognized that employment policies must grant flexibility to the working schedules to allow parents to reconcile family and work. By exploiting the particularity of the East German labor market, I identify the causal effect of temporal work flexibility on parental time with children. The...

The share of single mothers is higher in East Germany than in West Germany. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we examine two transmission channels leading to single motherhood, namely out-of-partnership births and separations of couples with minor children. Women in East Germany...

Over the last decades fertility rates have decreased in most developed countries, while female labour force participation has increased strongly over the same time period. To shed light on the relationship between women’s fertility and employment decisions, we analyse their transitions to the...

Although economic agents routinely face various types of economic uncertainty, their effects are often unclear and hard to assess, in part due to the absence of suitable measures of uncertainty. Because of the numerous and very substantial institutional changes that people in the transition...

Although economic agents routinely face various types of economic uncertainty, their effects are often unclear and hard to assess, in part due to the absence of suitable measures of uncertainty. Because of the numerous and very substantial institutional changes that people in the transition...

Economic agents routinely face various types of economic uncertainty. Seldom have these various forms of uncertainty manifested themselves more sharply than in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe. In East Germany, the transition was especially rapid and sharp since East...

Determining the optimal age at which a child should enter school is a controversial topic in education policy. In particular, German policy makers, pedagogues, parents, and teachers have since long discussed whether the traditional, established age of school entry at 6 years remains appropriate....