Topic Inequality

The Gender Division of Unpaid Care Work throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic in Germany

The COVID-19 pandemic and related closures of day care centres and schools significantly increased the amount of care work done by parents. There has been much speculation over whether the pandemic increased or decreased gender equality in parental care work. Based on representative data for Germany from spring 2020 and winter 2021 we present an empirical analysis that shows that although gender inequality ...

The Intergenerational Transmission of Gender Norms: Why and How Adolescent Males with Working Mothers Matter for Female Labour Market Outcomes

Social norms are put forward as a prominent explanation for the changing labour supply decisions of women. This paper studies the intergenerational transmission of these norms, examining how they affect subsequent female labour supply decisions, taking into account not only the early socialization of women but also that of their partner. Using large representative panel data sets from West Germany, ...

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 ...

Information Provision and Postgraduate Studies

This is the first paper to examine experimentally effects of information provision on beliefs about pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns of postgraduate education, enrolment intentions and realized enrolment. We find that our treatment causally affects beliefs measured six months after treatment. The effects on beliefs differ by gender and academic background, and we find that stated enrolment intentions ...

Parental Leave Benefits and Child Penalties

I use the universe of tax returns in Germany and a regression kink design to estimate the impact of the benefit amount available to high-earning women after their first childbirth on subsequent within-couple earnings inequality. Lower benefit amounts result in a reduced earnings gap that persists beyond the benefit period for at least nine years after the birth. The longer-term impacts are driven by ...

Parental Leave and Discrimination on the Labor Market

Social Mobility and Economic Development

We explore the role of social mobility as driver of economic development. First, we draw the geography of intergenerational mobility of education for 52 Latin American regions, as well as its evolution over time. Then, through a novel weighting procedure that considers the aggregate participation of cohorts to the economy in every year, we estimate the effect of changes in mobility on economic...

Culture, Children and Couple Gender Inequality

This paper examines how culture determines within-couple gender inequality. Exploiting the setting of Germany's division and reunification, I compare child penalties of couples socialised in a more gender-egalitarian culture to those in a gender-traditional culture. The long-run penalty on the female income share is 30.9% in West German couples, compared to 18.3% in East German...

Causes and Consequences of Educational Attainment and Household Decisions: Six Essays in Applied Microeconomics

The Effect of Early Childhood Education and Care Services on the Integration of Refugee Families

Devising appropriate policy measures to integrate refugees is high on the agenda of many governments. This paper focuses on the integration of families seeking asylum in Germany between 2013 and 2016. Exploiting regional differences in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services and dispersal policies as exogenous sources of variation, as well as controlling for local level heterogeneity that ...