Topic Family

Parental Health Shocks and Young Adults’ Life Trajectories (joint work with Anna Person)

As Western populations age, more adult children face parental health challenges. Caregiving responsibilities towards parents are becoming crucial concerns for families, healthcare systems, and societies. While this care is essential for elderly well-being, it also demands significant time, energy and emotional resources. Yet, the impact of care provision on caregivers’ lives remains understudied....

Spousal death, mental health and survivor benefits

This paper investigates the mental health consequences of spousal death and the role of survivor benefits in mitigating these effects. Using Dutch administrative data and a staggered difference-in-differences, we first document a significant increase in the consumption of benzodiazepines - a proxy for deteriorating mental health - following widowhood (up to +3 percentage points, or +30%, in the...

Poverty risk decreases - especially in eastern Germany and among single parents

Special Brown Bag: Moving to Opportunity, Together

Many couples face a trade-off between advancing one spouse’s career or the other’s. We study this trade-off using administrative data from Germany and Sweden. We first conduct an event-study analysis of couples moving across commuting zones and find that relocation increases men’s earnings more than women’s, with strikingly similar patterns in Germany and Sweden. Using a sample of mass layoff...

How Spousal Bereavement Shapes Life Satisfaction: Stability and Change Across Historical Time

The Gender Pension Gap Grows the More Children a Woman Has

The gender pension gap, the difference in pension entitlements between men and women, is 32 percent for 60-yearolds according to data from the German Pension Insurance (Deutsche Rentenversicherung). In addition, there is a considerable motherhood pension gap: Statutory pension entitlements for mothers and childless women differ greatly. Pension-related childcare credits, which were introduced in 1986 ...

A Cohabitation Wealth Premium for Women and Men: Considering the Regulatory Framework and Normative Acceptance in France and Germany

We examine the association between cohabitation and women’s and men’s wealth, closely considering the distinct regulatory and normative contexts in France and Eastern and Western Germany. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio- Economic Panel Study (2002–2017) and the French wealth survey Histoire de Vie et Patrimoine (2014/15-2020/21), we apply fixed-effects regression models to examine potential ...

Income Distribution: Signs of a Trend Reversal In the Poverty Risk; Single Parents Less Frequently at Risk of Poverty

Despite high inflation, the real gross hourly wages of employees grew by around 15 percent from 1995 to 2022. In particular, the lowest wage decile caught back up to all other deciles following a sharp drop in real wages. At the same time, the low-wage sector has shrunk by nearly five percentage points since 2007, and by even more in the east of Germany (14 percent). In 2022, 18.5 percent of employees ...

Health of Parents, Their Children's Labor Supply, and the Role of Migrant Care Workers

We estimate the impact of parental health on adult children’s labor market out- comes. We focus on health shocks that increase care dependency abruptly. Our estimation strategy exploits the variation in the timing of shocks across treated families. Empirical results based on administrative data show a significant negative impact on the labor market activities of children. This effect is more pronounced for ...

Mortality Inequality in Chile

This paper analyses trends in mortality inequality in 330 Chilean communes from 1990 to 2010 for different age groups and both genders. Chile had substantial inequalities in local-level mortality rates in 1990 but by 2010 these disparities had significantly decreased, especially among infants, children and the elderly. The only exception was Chilean men aged 20–39, for whom inequality in mortality ...