By the end of the Second World War, an estimated 20 percent of the West German housing stock had been destroyed. Building on a theoretical lifecycle model of wealth accumulation, this paper examines the extent to which regional differences in destruction can explain differences in wealth today” – at the beginning of the 21st century. As our empirical basis, we link a unique historical dataset on the ...
This paper estimates the causal effect of increased availability of early childcare on maternal health. We focus on a substantial expansion of childcare for children under three years in West Germany from 2006 to 2019. By matching county-level childcare attendance rates with individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we are able to quantify the effects of this expansion on maternal ...
The debate on the effects of child care policies on household and individual behavior is substantial but lacks a discussion of the unintended consequences of rising wages in the child care work sector. To address this gap in the debate, the relation between rising pay and formal child care hours, informal child care hours, and employment hours is analyzed empirically with a case study on child care ...
Since the new millennium, research in the field of personality development has focused on the stability and change of basic personality traits. Motivational aspects of personality and their longitudinal association with basic traits have received comparably little attention. In this preregistered study, we applied bivariate latent growth curve modeling to investigate the codevelopment of nine life ...
Subjective well-being is essential for both quality of life and a healthy society. Studies have shown that satisfied people have better relationships, are more productive, and have a longer life expectancy. General life satisfaction is being discussed as an alternative measure of prosperity beyond GDP. Thus, findings on this topic are relevant for both the scientific community as well as policymakers. ...
This study provides the first absolute income mobility estimates for postwar Germany. Using various micro data sources, we uncover a steep decline in absolute mobility rates from 81 percent to 59 percent for children’s birth cohorts 1962 through 1988. This trend is robust across different ages, family sizes, measurement methods, copulas, and data sources. Across the parental income distribution, we ...
We estimate the impact of parental health on adult children’s labor market out- comes. We focus on health shocks that increase care dependency abruptly. Our estimation strategy exploits the variation in the timing of shocks across treated families. Empirical results based on administrative data show a significant negative impact on the labor market activities of children. This effect is more pronounced for ...
