Topic Family

Culture, Children and Couple Gender Inequality

This paper examines how culture impacts within-couple gender inequality. Exploiting thesetting of Germany’s division and reunification, I compare child penalties of East Germans whowere socialised in a more gender egalitarian culture to West Germans socialised in a gendertraditionalculture. Using a household panel, I show that the long-run child penalty on thefemale income share is 23.9 percentage ...

Increasing employment and family care? A structural analysis of pension and long-term care policy reforms

We develop a comprehensive life-cycle model of elder parent care and work to evaluate options that address pressing conflicts between pension and long-term care (LTC) policies. Many OECD countries react to challenges of demographic change by increasing LTC by family members (informal care) and raising retirement ages. This intensifies conflicts between paid employment and informal care provision....

Jonas Jessen has successfully defended his dissertation

Jonas Jessen, who worked at the Education and Family department, has successfully defended his dissertation at the Freie Universität Berlin. The dissertation with the title "Unintended Consequences and Spill-over Effects of Family Policies: Six Essays in Labour and Family Economics" was supervised by Prof. C. Katharina Spieß (DIW Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin) and Prof. ...

The dynamics of informal and formal care supply to parents - a structural model

In this paper, we estimate a structural dynamic discrete choice model of informal as well as formal care provision, retirement and labor supply. The model allows to assess the dynamic consequences of providing informal care or organizing formal care for parents, e.g., due to reduced wages, pension benefits, or benefits from long-term care insurance. Further, it allows to analyze counterfactual...

Parental Leave and Discrimination on the Labor Market

Intergenerational Effects of Grandparental Care on Children and Parents

Grandparents act as the third biggest care giver besides day care and parental care for children below the age of 6 in most OECD countries. Despite its relevance, the effects of child care provided by grandparents on child and parental outcomes have received little attention in the literature. We investigate the potential impact of grandparental care on children's...

Unequal ageing: life-expectancy, care needs and reforms to the welfare state

The main objective of this project is to analyse how inequalities in old age have developed over time and birth cohorts, to what extent public policies have influenced these trends, and to assess the potential of sociopolitical reforms to reduce such inequalities. This project analyses and compares data and sociopolitical reforms (retirement and longterm care) from North America (Canada), Western...

The effects of personality on the native-migrant labour market gap

This article quantifies differences in personality skills (Big Five Factor, locus of control, reciprocity, life goals and risk) and their assimilation rate between first-generation immigrants and native Germans, using the SOEP survey. The results reveal that the two groups differentiate in their personality traits but immigrants do not tend to assimilate natives during...

Technological Change and Labor Market Opportunities

The role of skill-biased technological change for increasing wage inequality is well documented. Interestingly, we find that even though in Germany from 1986 to 2012 wage inequality rose, the wage penalty of a disadvantaged family background declined. Our analysis shows that this development is consistently linked to technological progress. The introduction and the use of...

Health Effects of Prenatal and Infancy Home Visiting Programs by Nurses: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

Home visiting programmes are increasingly being implemented across the globe to help vulnerable families with young children, however longer-term experimental evidence on their health impacts on both parents and children is scarce. In this paper we study the medium-term health impacts of a randomized control trial to evaluate the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP), one of the oldest home visitation...