Topic Family

Hit where it hurts: Healthcare access and Intimate Partner Violence

Parental Leave Policy and Long-run Earnings of Mothers

Paid parental leave schemes have been shown to increase women’s employment rates but to decrease their wages in case of extended leave duration. In view of these potential trade-offs, many countries are discussing the optimal design of parental leave policies. We analyze the impact of a major parental leave reform on mothers’ long-term earnings. The 2007 German parental leave reform replaced a means-tested ...

The Long Reach of Class Origin on Financial Investments and Net Worth

In this study, we argue that parents' class position may influence the type and timing of their offspring's investments in financial assets. These investments may facilitate net worth accumulation beyond direct transfers, contributing to the intergenerational reproduction of social positions. We test these expectations using retrospective life history and prospective panel data for 14 countries from ...

Intergenerational Scars: The Impact of Parental Unemployment on Individual Health Later in Life

This paper studies whether individuals that experienced parental unemployment during their childhood/early adolescence have poorer health once they reach the adulthood. We used data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 2002 until 2018. Our identification strategy of the causal effect of parental unemployment relied on plant closures as exogenous variation of the individual labor market condition. ...

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 ...

Gender Care Gap and Gender Pay Gap Increase Substantially until Middle Age

While the gender pay gap between men and women in Germany remains at 18 percent, this figure is not the same for all employees. There are, for example, major differences by age. Beginning at age 30, the gender pay gap increases sharply and remains constantly high at 20 percent until retirement. Closely related to this is the gender care gap, the difference in unpaid care work between women and men. ...

The Transition to Grandparenthood: No Consistent Evidence for Change in the Big Five Personality Traits and Life Satisfaction

Intergenerational relations have received close attention in the context of population aging and increased childcare provision by grandparents. However, few studies have investigated the psychological consequences of becoming a grandparent. In a preregistered test of grandparenthood as a developmental task in middle and older adulthood, we used representative panel data from the Netherlands (N = 563) ...

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...