In this paper, we take a multilevel perspective to investigate the role of child care in the transition to motherhood in Germany. We argue that in the European institutional context the availability of public day care and informal child care arrangements should be a central element of the local opportunity structure regarding the compatibility of childrearing and women's employment. Using data from ...
We examine the impact of family income during childhood on the type of secondary school that German children attend, a good indicator of their lifetime socioeconomic attainment. By contrast with several US child outcome studies, we find that late-childhood income is a more important determinant of outcomes than early-childhood income, and income effects are not greater for poor households compared ...
Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and selfselection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and representative surveys thereby overcoming crucial weaknesses of both approaches. One of the major advantages of our approach ...
We use data from the 1996 wave of the European Community Household Panel to present and compare the weekly number of hours mothers of children less than 16 years of age reported looking after children in nine European countries in 1996. In addition, we explore to what extent cross-country differences in socio-demographic characteristics and parents' employment status contribute to differences in maternal ...
Overall, children in Germany live in households with below average incomes; therefore social policies that address the vulnerable position of Germany's children are necessary. These policies should cover targeted financial transfers as well as improvements in day care provision for children. With respect to selected non-monetary as well as monetary indicators our empirical analyses show significant ...
We use data from Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden to examine whether part-time and intermittent work during early motherhood leads to regular full-time work later. We find that in Sweden, by the time the first child is four years old 80 percent of mothers are working full-time if 25 hours is counted as full-time work, but only 30 percent if a 35-hour threshold is used. This finding ...
This paper examines the similarity in the association between earnings of sons and fathers in Germany and the United States. It relaxes the log-linear functional form imposed in most studies of the intergenerational earnings association. Theory implies the relationship between earnings of fathers and sons could be nonlinear, especially at the tails of the distribution of earnings of fathers. When a ...
The United States is often considered to be more free-wheeling and mobile than Germany; however, previous cross-national studies of income mobility find the oppositeis true. This paper investigates these surprising results and finds that they are confirmed when income mobility is measured by changes in the positions of individuals inthe income distribution - members of former West German households ...