This study is an empirical investigation of the empty nest syndrome, commonly understood as a situation where there are feelings of loss or loneliness for mothers and/or fathers following the departure of the last child from the family home. This investigation makes use of rich, longitudinal, nationally representative German data to assess whether there is evidence for such a syndrome. Furthermore, ...
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...
The role of skill-biased technological change for increasing wage inequality is well documented. Interestingly, we find that even though in Germany from 1986 to 2012 wage inequality rose, the wage penalty of a disadvantaged family background declined. Our analysis shows that this development is consistently linked to technological progress. The introduction and the use of...
Based on findings from high-income countries, typically economists hypothesize that having more children unambiguously decreases the time mothers spend in the labor market. Few studies on lower-income countries, in which low household wealth, informal child care, and informal employment opportunities prevail, find mixed results. Using Mexican census data, I do not find evidence for negative employment ...
Childcare workers are essential for both families and society at large, and their working conditions and pay are often a topic of discussion. Using new data spanning until the end of 2019 from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) as well as a special SOEP additional survey in day care centers, this report shows how childcare workers view their occupation, day-to-day work, and pay. According to the data, ...
Based on panel data from 1997 to 2018, we investigate the socioeconomic preconditions and economic consequences of ‘shared parenting (SP)’ forms in Germany. Referring to the post-separation year, we build SP groups from information on child residence and fathers’ childcare hours during a regular weekday. We explore the short-term gender and SP group associations with economic well-being as well as, ...
Amid concerns of long-term economic consequences of divorce, cross-sectional research illustrated that ever-divorce men but particularly women hold less per capita wealth than continuously married spouses in older age. Using a longitudinal approach and unique personal-level wealth data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, the present study aims to understand how divorce stratifies men’s and ...
This article quantifies differences in personality skills (Big Five Factor, locus of control, reciprocity, life goals and risk) and their assimilation rate between first-generation immigrants and native Germans, using the SOEP survey. The results reveal that the two groups differentiate in their personality traits but immigrants do not tend to assimilate natives during...
This paper provides evidence that low private contributions to highly subsidised day care constrain mothers from working longer hours. We study the effects of reforms that abolished day care fees in Germany on parental labour supply. The reforms removed private contributions to highly subsidised day care in the year before children enter primary school. We exploit the staggered reform across states ...