Externe Monographien
Jonas Jessen
2021,
This dissertation consists of six independent chapters contributing to the literature of labour and family economics. The main topic concerns how family policies impact on gender and socio-economic inequality in, at times, unintended ways. Chapter 2 uses administrative linked employer-employee data to examine whether employers statistically discriminated against women of childbearing age (potential mothers) when they incurred direct costs associated with motherhood. Before 2006, large firms in Germany were obliged to pay for the generous maternity protection of female employees, such that firms’ expected wage costs depended on employees’ gender and age. From 2006 onward, all firms paid for maternity protection by contributing to the statutory health insurance system, where the contribution depends only on the number of employees and their wages and is thus independent of gender and age. We provide evidence that the reform was followed by an increase in female relative wages within large firms. This reform effect provides evidence for statistical employer discrimination in the pre-2006 setup. Chapter 3 takes a firm-side perspective on parental leave. Motherhood and parental leave interrupt employment relationships, likely imposing costs on firms. We document that mothers who are difficult to replace internally take shorter leave and that their firms hire replacements more often. Introducing more generous parental leave benefits erases the link between mothers’ internal replaceability and their leave duration. In firms with few internal substitutes this reduces employment in the short-, but not longer-term. Firms respond by hiring fewer women of childbearing age into occupations where they are difficult to replace internally. Taken together, motherhood and generous parental leave policies burden firms that have few internal substitutes available. Chapter 4 aims to improve the understanding of day care enrolment gaps by family background in a country with a universal day care system (Germany). Research demonstrates that children of parents with lower educational attainment and children of migrant parents may benefit the most from day care, making it important to understand why such enrolment gaps exist. We use a unique data set that records both parental demand for day care and actual usage to investigate determinants using complementary decomposition and quasi-experimental analyses. Our decomposition shows that (a) differences in demand are important but do not fully explain the enrolment gaps, (b) large shares of the gaps are unexplained, especially for migrant parents, and (c) the heterogeneous effects of access barriers (shortages and fees) may explain some of the remaining gaps. Our quasi-experimental design finds that reducing shortages significantly decreases the enrolment gap by parental education but not by parental migrant status. Similarly, using the synthetic control method we show that a reduction of fees reduces only the gap by parental education. We discuss implications for policy. Chapter 5 estimates the effect of day care on parenting activities using time-diary and survey data for Germany. This is the first such study in economics to pay careful attention to issues of selection bias, and to provide a conceptual framework of underlying mechanisms. We find that while day care strongly reduces the amount of time parents spent with their child, parenting activities are only reduced by a few minutes per day. During non-center hours, parenting activities are not affected. An analysis of non-parenting activities reveals that day care is used to take up paid work, but also partly to ease time constraints. A reduction of leisure and sleep during non-center hours suggests that an increase in motivation may be responsible for keeping parenting activities constant during those times. Our findings represent novel evidence that activities in the home environment are a complement to day care, highlighting a credible alternative mechanism for child development effects of day care. Chapter 6 uses novel time-use data from the GDR and reunified Germany and finds that women in the GDR, and later in East Germany, spend more time in paid work and less time doing housework, compared to West Germany. However, decomposing these gender housework gaps between the West and the East, we find that they are similar once individual time constraints are accounted for. Individual housework contributions are shown to be almost orthogonal to the partner’s labour supply. We discuss implications for the nature of gender norms, and effects of labour market policy targeted at gender gaps. Chapter 7 examines how culture impacts within-couple gender inequality. Exploiting the setting of Germany’s division and reunification, I compare child penalties of couples socialised in a more gender-egalitarian culture (East Germany) to those in a gender-traditional culture (West Germany). Using a household panel, I show that the long-run child penalty on the female income share is 26.9 percentage points in West German couples, compared to 15.5 in East German couples. Additionally, the arrival of children leads to a stronger increase in the share of housework performed by West German women and they are responsible for a larger share of child care than those from the East. A battery of robustness checks confirms that differences between East and West socialised couples are not driven by current location, economic factors, day care availability or other smooth regional differences. I add to the main findings by using time-use diary data from the GDR and reunified Germany, comparing parents with childless couples of similar ages. This provides a rare insight into gender inequality in the GDR and allows to compare the effect of children in the GDR to the effects in East and West Germany after reunification. Lastly, I show that attitudes towards maternal employment are more egalitarian among East Germans, but that the arrival of children leads to more traditional attitudes for both East and West Germans. The findings confirm that socialisation has a strong impact on child penalties and thus on gender inequality as a whole.
Themen: Familie