Thema Gender

Women Still the Exception on Executive Boards of Germany's Large Firms: Gradually Increasing Representation on Supervisory Boards

The trend toward more women on the corporate boards of German companies continued in 2013, albeit on a small scale. The share of women on the supervisory boards of the 200 largest companies increased by more than two percentage points, and thus at a somewhat higher rate than in recent years, to just over 15 percent. The corresponding share of women on executive boards virtually stagnated at a low level ...

Public Companies Could Play a Pioneering Role: Six Questions to Elke Holst

Financial Sector: Upward Trend in Share of Women on Corporate Boards Progressing Only in Small Steps

Last year, more women were appointed to the executive boards of major financial institutions. The share of women on the executive boards of banks and savings banks at the end of 2013 was a good six percent, which represents an increase of almost two percentage points over the previous year. This increase is primarily attributable to changes at private financial institutions and cooperative banks. At ...

Overeducation among Graduates - an Overlooked Facet of the Gender Pay Gap? Evidence from East and West Germany

Germany's occupational and sectoral change towards a knowledge-based economy calls for high returns to education. Nevertheless, female graduates are paid much less than their male counterparts. We wonder whether overeducation affects sexes differently and whether this might answer for part of the gender pay gap. We decompose total year of schooling in years of over- (O), required (R), and undereducation ...

Fixed-Term Employment and Fertility: Evidence from German Micro Data

We study the short- to medium-run effects of starting a career on a fixed-term contract on subsequent fertility outcomes. We focus on the career start since we expect that temporary contracts and their inherent economic uncertainty imply a path dependency which might have spill-over effects on other domains of life. Our empirical analysis is based on rich data from the German Socio-Economic Panel which ...

Love Thy Neighbor: Religion and Prosocial Behavior

There is a long tradition in psychology, the social sciences and, more recently though, economics to hypothesize that religion enhances prosocial behavior. Evidence from both survey and experimental data however yield mixed results and there is barely any evidence for Germany. This study adds to this literature by exploring data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which provides both attitudinal ...

Eastern Germany Ahead in Employment of Women

Almost a quarter of a century after the fall of the Wall, there are still more women in employment in eastern Germany than in the west. Although the disparity is marginal now, the two regions started from dramatically different levels. In 1991, immediately after reunification, the employment rate for women in western Germany was 54.6 percent, but since then it has increased year on year, reaching 67.5 ...

Gender Pension Gap in Eastern and Western Germany

Now, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, eastern and western German men are receiving similar state pensions, the main pillar in the system of old age provision in Germany. In contrast, the average pension paid to eastern German women far exceeds that of their western counterparts. A cohort comparison shows a narrowing of the gender gap when it comes to pension entitlements in eastern Germany. ...

Is Crowdfunding Different? Evidence on the Relation between Gender and Funding Success from a Peer-to-Peer Lending Platform

According to the literature on traditional banking, lenders often discriminate against female borrowers. However, studies of Peer-to-Peer lending in the United States find that female borrowers have better chances of obtaining funds than do males. We provide evidence on the success of female borrowers at a large German peer-to-peer lending platform. Our results show that there is no effect of gender ...

Illness and Health Satisfaction: The Role of Relative Comparisons

This paper investigates the role of relative comparisons in health status for individual health satisfaction. Previous research stresses the importance of interdependencies in subjective well-being and health arising from positional preferences and status e ects, social health norms, and comparison processes. Using representative longitudinal data from a German population survey, we estimate empirical ...