Striving for Equal Opportunities: Essays on the Distribution and Transmission of Economic Resources

Abstract

The first paper investigates if the greater variety in living arrangements contributes to increased resource disparities among children in Germany. Children in single parent families are disadvantaged in at least three dimensions decisive for their later achievements: material standard of living, parental education, and parental childcare time. We compute multidimensional inequality and poverty indices using SOEP data from 1991 to 2012. We distinguish between parental and publicly provided childcare, which is an increasingly important in-kind benefit in Germany. We find that both multidimensional inequality and poverty declined as expanded public childcare strongly reduces resource disparities among children. The second paper investigates the redistributive impact of private and public childcare provision and education on children's resources in Germany between 2009 and 2013. It takes account of the multidimensionality of children's needs and access to economic resources by applying an extended income approach. Combining survey data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with administrative data from the German Federal Statistical Office, extended disposable income inequality is found to be significantly lower than disposable cash income inequality at the five percent level across all years. However, the extension does not significantly change distributional trends. At the same time, publicly provided childcare and schooling notably decrease inequality among children such that it cushions cash income inequality. One major reason for this effect is that public in-kind benefits profit children living with single parents, which are deprived in terms of cash incomes, most. This gives additional evidence on the importance of publicly provided childcare and schooling as a policy instrument to equalize economic resources and opportunities in children's lives. Using harmonized household survey data, the third paper analyses long run social mobility in the US, the UK, and Germany and tests recent theories of multigenerational persistence of socio-economic status. The results show that the long run persistence of socio-economic status and the validity of a first-order Markov chain in the intergenerational transmission of human capital might be country-specific. Furthermore, we find that the direct and independent effect of grandparents' social status on grandchildren's status tends to vary by gender and institutional context.