Topic Family

Short-time Work vs. Unemployment: Gendered Differences in Labour Market Outcomes

In the recent economic crises, Germany has made use of job retention schemes and in particular short-time work benefits ('Kurzarbeit') to tackle shocks in labor demand. Under these schemes, workers have not been laid off and received unemployment benefits, but reduced their working hours (or stopped working) for a limited amount of time while receiving short-time leave benefits. While the effect...

Survivor benefits and conjugal behavior. Evidence from the Netherlands

Promotion prospects and within-level wage growth: A decomposition of the part-time penalty

The part-time wage penalty is a key contributor to the gender wage gap. In this paper, I study how the part-time penalty decomposes in a lack of promotions to higher paying levels of the career ladder and a lack of wage growth conditional on the career level. I develop a dynamic model of labor supply that distinctly features hierarchical wage structures and promotions. I estimate the...

A decomposition of the life-cycle part-time wage gap: Forgone promotion prospects and stagnant wage growth within job levels

Long periods of part-time work lead to a stagnation of wage growth. In this paper, I study how the wage stagnation decomposes in lack of career development and the lack of wage growth conditional on the career level. I develop a dynamic choice model of labor supply which distinctly incorporates vertical career moves to jobs paying higher wages as a function of the choice of hours of work. I...

The Gender Division of Unpaid Care Work throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic in Germany

The COVID-19 pandemic and related closures of day care centres and schools significantly increased the amount of care work done by parents. There has been much speculation over whether the pandemic increased or decreased gender equality in parental care work. Based on representative data for Germany from spring 2020 and winter 2021 we present an empirical analysis that shows that although gender inequality ...

Centre-Based Care and Parenting Activities

We examine the relationship between parenting activities and centre-based care using time diary and survey data for mothers in Germany. While mothers using centre-based care spend significantly less time in the presence of their child, we find that differences in the time spent on specific activities such as reading, talking, and playing with the child are relatively small or zero. The pattern of results ...

Heterogeneous Effects of After-School Care on Child Development

It is often argued that institutionalized after-school care (ASC) can benefit children lacking adequate homework support at home and, hence, foster equality of opportunity. However, despite considerable policy interest, it is unclear whether these afternoon programs are beneficial for child development and if selection into them is efficient, i.e., whether students benefiting most from the programs ...

Parental Leave Benefits and Child Penalties

I use the universe of tax returns in Germany and a regression kink design to estimate the impact of the benefit amount available to high-earning women after their first childbirth on subsequent within-couple earnings inequality. Lower benefit amounts result in a reduced earnings gap that persists beyond the benefit period for at least nine years after the birth. The longer-term impacts are driven by ...

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 ...

The Length of Schooling and the Timing of Family Formation

Individuals typically traverse several life phases before forming a family. We analyze whether changing the duration of one of these phases, the education phase, affects the timing of marriage and childbearing. For this purpose, we exploit the introduction of short school years (SSYs) in Germany in 1966–1967, which compressed the education phase without affecting the curriculum. Based on difference-in-differences ...