Topic Family

Children in Poverty: A British-German Comparison for the 1990s

The Differential Influence of Women's Residential District on Their Risk of Entering Motherhood and First Marriage: A Discrete-Time Multilevel Analysis of Western German Panel Data, 1984 - 1999

To begin with, we sketch a general multilevel model of regional social contexts and individual family formation behavior, where particular attention is paid to the determinants of the actor's situation. Then a set of bridge hypotheses is proposed, on which the empirical investigation of the relationship between properties of the spatial context and women's entry into motherhood and first marriage is ...

Smoke Signals: The Intergenerational Transmission of Smoking Behavior

In this paper, we investigate the intergenerational transmission of smoking behavior from parents to their children using data from the German Socio- Economic Panel, surveyed in 1999 including 813 youths aged 16 through 19. We find strong evidence, that parental smoking significantly increases the probability that their children likewise become smokers. Youths living in families with both parents smoking ...

Modelling Low Income Transitions

We examine the determinants of low income transitions using first-order Markov models that control for initial conditions effects (those found to be poor in the base year may be a nonrandom sample) and for attrition (panel retention may also be non-random). Our econometric model is a form of endogeneous switching regression, and is fitted using simulated maximum likelihood methods. The estimates, derived ...

The Effect of Maternity Leave on Women's Pay in Germany 1984-1994

In 1986 German federal parental leave and benefit policy was expanded in several ways, extending the potential duration of leave from six to ten months and paying child-rearing benefits to all new mothers regardless of their employment status before childbirth. The potential duration has increased four times since 1986 and stood at 18 months in 1991 and three years starting in 1992. This study uses ...

A Multilevel Analysis of Child Care and the Transition to Motherhood in Western Germany

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 ...

A Nation-Wide Laboratory: Examining Trust and Trustworthiness by Integrating Behavioral Experiments into Representative Surveys

Die experimentelle Ökonomie führt typischerweise Labor-Untersuchungen durch, die mit homogenen und selektiven Versuchspersonen arbeiten. Repräsentative Surveys leiden hingegen unter Messfehlern und der Frage, ob hypothetisches Verhalten, das erhoben wird, mit tatsächlichem Verhalten korrespondiert. Deswegen präsentieren wir eine Methode, mit der man die Schwächen beider Ansätze überwindet, indem man ...

European Mothers' Time with Children: Differences and Similarities across Nine Countries

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 ...

The Effect of Family Income during Childhood on Later-life Attainment: Evidence from Germany

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 ...

A Nation-Wide Laboratory: Examining Trust and Trustworthiness by Integrating Behavioral Experiments into Representative Surveys

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 ...