The recession induced by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in major declines in employment of women, both from the demand side as firms reduced employment and from the supply side resulting from school closures and the closing of many child care facilities. We provide projections of possible...

We formalize and estimate the dynamic marginal efficiency cost of redistribution (MECR) in the spirit of Okun's "leaky bucket". We analyze the MECR of an income-contingent childcare subsidy program and the income tax within the German context, using a dynamic structural heterogeneous-household...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

This paper investigates the effect of locus of control (LOC) on the length of mothers’ employment break after childbirth. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), duration data reveals that women with an internal LOC return to employment more quickly than women with an...

In 30% of young American couples the wife is more educated than the husband. Those women are characterized by a substantially higher employment (all else equal), which in turn amplifies income inequality across couples. Using NLSY79, we formulate and structurally estimate a dynamic life-cycle...

Elisabeth Grewenig prepared this study while she was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in March 2021 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of five distinct empirical essays that...

This paper investigates the effect of locus of control (LOC) on the length of mothers’ employment break after childbirth. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), duration data reveals that women with an internal LOC return to employment more quickly than women with an...

This paper constructs and estimates a dynamic discrete choice structural model of female employment and fertility decisions that incorporates job protection and cash benefits of parental leave legislation. The structural model is used for ex ante evaluation of policies that change the duration...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

The recession induced by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in major declines in employment of women, both from the demand side as firms reduced employment and from the supply side resulting from school closures and the closing of many child care facilities. We provide projections of possible...