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Subjective Age and Attitudes toward Own Aging across Two Decades of Historical Time

A large body of empirical evidence has accumulated showing that the experience of old age is “younger,” more “agentic,” and “happier” than ever before. However, it is not yet known whether historical improvements in well-being, control beliefs, cognitive functioning, and other outcomes generalize to individuals’ views on their own aging process. To examine historical changes in such views on aging, ...

A Domain-Differentiated Approach to Everyday Emotion Regulation from Adolescence to Older Age

Flexibly using different emotion-regulation (ER) strategies in different situational contexts, such as domains, has been argued to promote effective emotion regulation. Additionally, emotion regulation processes may change with age as narrowing time horizons shift emotion-regulation preferences. The purpose of the present study was to examine the occurrence and effectiveness of flexible emotion regulation ...

Survivor benefits and conjugal behavior. Evidence from the Netherlands

Physical and Mental Health Changes in the Five Years before and Five Years after Childbirth: A Population-Based Panel Study in First-Time Mothers and Fathers from Germany

Background: The transition to parenthood is characterized by far-reaching changes in life. However, little prospective-longitudinal evidence from general population samples exists on changes of general physical and mental health in the years around the birth of a child among mothers and fathers. Methods: Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), this study examined continuous and ...

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 ...

Center-Based Care and Parenting Activities

We examine the relationship between parenting activities and center-based care using time diary and survey data for mothers in Germany. While mothers using center-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 ...

Distributional effects of financial support models for family caregivers

Informal care provided by family members is the central pillar of home care in Germany. In view of the increasing need for care and the shortage of skilled workers in formal care, the informal pillar may even gain in importance in the future. It is of central importance that informal caregivers find conditions that make it easier for them to engage in informal care. It is well known that informal...

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 ...

Pension Reforms and Couples’ Labour Supply Decisions

To determine how wives’ and husbands’ retirement options affect their spouses’ (and their own) labour supply decisions, we exploit (early) retirement cutoffs by way of a regression discontinuity design. Several German pension reforms since the early 1990s have gradually raised women’s retirement age from 60 to 65, but also increased ages for several early retirement pathways affecting both sexes. We ...

Teleworking and Life Satisfaction during COVID-19: The Importance of Family Structure

We carry out a difference-in-differences analysis of a representative real-time survey conducted as part of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study and show that teleworking had a negative average effect on life satisfaction over the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. This average effect hides considerable heterogeneity reflecting genderrole asymmetry: lower life satisfaction is only found ...