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 substantial expansion of public child care for under three year old children. Using administrative county-level data, we exploit...

While many commentators perceive unemployment to be a key risk factor for intimate partner violence, the empirical evidence remains limited. We combine individual-level data from the British Crime Survey (BCS) with local labor market data to estimate the effects of total and gender-specific...

In Germany, it has become conventional wisdom that the economic uncertainty associated fixed-term employment contracts prevents young couples from realizing their desire to have children. From a research perspective, it is however far from clear whether fixed-term contracts are the obstacle to...

Am 28. Oktober 2011 wurde in Berlin der 8. Familienbericht an die Bundesministerin für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend übergeben. Er beschäftigt sich mit dem Thema »Zeit für Familie« und mit den Notwendigkeiten und Möglichkeiten einer Familienzeitpolitik. Für die Erstellung des...

This paper explores the implications of gender-based income taxation in a non-cooperative model of a couple’s time allocation between market work and providing a household public good. We find that the optimal structure of differential taxation by gender is solely determined by spouses’...

This article develops a simple model of household decisions that explicitly accounts for the role played by the Working Families’Tax Credit (WFTC) to examine its effects on couples in Britain. The main implications of the model are tested using panel data from the British Household Panel...

The paper explores the importance of unanticipated house price shocksfor marital dissolution in the UK by using individual household datafrom the British Household Panel Survey and county level house pricedata from the Halifax house price index. Results suggest that positiveand negative house...

We present a noncooperative model of a family’s time allocation between work and a home-produced public good, and examine whether the income tax should apply to couples or individuals. While tax-induced labor supply distortions lead to overprovision of the public good, spouses’ failure to...

While research on domestic abuse in economics has to date almost exclusively focused on physical violence, research in other disciplines has documented that abusive males frequently also use sabotage tactics to interfere with the employability and job performance of the victim. This paper puts...

Standard theories of household decision making assume that family members have complete information about preferences and are able to reach efficient outcomes. However, partners in intimate relationships may often need to coordinate their choices in the face of incomplete information. To reduce...