The gender care gap, i.e., the difference between the amount of unpaid care work—such as childcare and housework—performed between men and women is comparatively high in Germany: Women take on much more unpaid care work than men. This gap increases consistently when starting a family. At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, many feared that the gender care gap may grow even larger. In ...
We contribute to the research on gender representation in economics by documenting the share of women among economists in a variety of leadership positions in the academic, but also in the private and public sectors, both globally and by region. For the years 2019 to 2023, we find women economists’ representation overall to be low in all sectors and no clear-cut trends over time. In academia, we find ...
We study the local evolution of female labour supply and cultural norms in West Germany in reaction to the sudden presence of East Germans who migrated to the West after reunification. These migrants grew up with high rates of maternal employment, whereas West German families mostly followed the traditional breadwinner-housewife model. We find that West German women increase their labour supply and ...
We empirically analyze the heterogeneous welfare effects of unemployment insurance and social assistance. We estimate a structural life-cycle model of singles' and married couples' labor supply and savings decisions. The model includes heterogeneity by age, education, wealth, sex and household composition. In aggregate, social assistance dominates unemployment insurance; however, the opposite holds ...
This study examines how inheritance and gift tax systems in combination with gendered parental transfer behavior strengthen gender wealth inequalities. Gender differences in transfers can be reproduced if men benefit differently than women from tax exemptions. This might happen when men and women receive different types of assets where only some are tax exempted. To investigate gendered parental...
In this project, a top-corrected wealth distribution is estimated on the basis of the inheritance tax statistics and the SOEP. We analyze the concentration of wealth, the portfolios of the wealthy, the importance of inherited wealth, the gender inheritance gap and the gender wealth gap as well as reactions to inheritance taxation.
This study provides novel evidence about the pension wealth elasticity of employment. For the identification we exploit reform-induced variation of pension wealth that is related to the number of children but which does not affect the implicit tax rate of employment. We use a difference-in-differences estimator based on administrative data from the German pension insurance and find that, on average, ...
This dissertation consists of five independent chapters contributing to the field of applied economics. The first three chapters analyze workers' perceptions of the wage penalty associated with working part-time, further evaluating the labor supply implications of biased beliefs. Chapter 4 quantifies the effects of raising the normal retirement age on the career trajectories of middle-aged workers ...
