In this study we assess the relationship between father and son earnings among (West) German Workers. To reduce the lifecycle and attenuation bias a novel sampling procedure is developed and applied to the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 1984-2006. Our preferred point estimate indicates an intergenerational earnings elasticity of 1/3 .
This paper examines the similarity in the association between earnings of sons and fathers in Germany and the United States. It relaxes the log-linear functional form imposed in most studies of the intergenerational earnings association. Theory implies the relationship between earnings of fathers and sons could be nonlinear, especially at the tails of the distribution of earnings of fathers. When a ...
This paper analyzes the influence of children's health and mothers' physical and mental wellbeing on female labor force participation after childbirth in Germany. Our analysis uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, which enables us to measure children's health based on the occurrence of severe health problems including mental and physical disabilities, hospitalizations, and preterm ...
Given shortages in public child care in Germany, this paper asks whether social support with child care and domestic work by spouses, kin and friends can facilitate mothers' return to full-time or part-time positions within the first six years after birth. Using SOEP data from 1993-2009 and event history analyses for competing risks, the author compares the employment transitions of West German, East ...
This study investigates the effects of maternal education on child's health and health behavior. We draw on a rich German panel data set containing information about three generations. This allows instrumenting maternal education by the number of her siblings while conditioning on grandparental characteristics. The instrumental variables approach has not yet been used in the intergenerational context ...
We examine how parental health shocks affect children's non-cognitive skills. Based on a German mother-and-child data base, we draw on significant changes in self-reported parental health as an exogenous source of health variation to identify effects on outcomes for children at ages of three and six years. At the age of six, we observe that maternal health shocks in the previous three years have significant ...
The German Child Benefit ("Kindergeld") is paid to legal guardians of children as a cash benefit. This study employs exogenous variations in the amount of child benefit received by households to investigate the extent to which these various changes have translated into an improvement in the circumstances of children related to their well-being. I use the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate the ...
We study the role of parental wealth for children's educational and occupational outcomes across three types of welfare states and outline a theoretical model that assumes parental wealth to impact offspring's attainment through two mechanisms, wealth's purchasing function and its insurance function. We argue that welfare states can limit the purchasing function of wealth, for instance by providing ...
In this study, we examine how economic performance during the child-specific primary school phase, during which teachers make recommendations regarding secondary school level, affects the educational level achieved ultimately by these children. Using data for Germany, we find that an economic downturn, coupled with increased unemployment, affects children's education attainment negatively. In terms ...