A Step in a New Direction? The Effect of the Parent's Money Reform of 2007 on Employment Rates of Mothers in Germany

Increasing maternal employment rates engage policies and people for decades. It is pushed but also questioned at the same time depending on whether women are regarded in first line as mothers or workers. In Germany, the male breadwinner model is traditionally favored. The parent's money reform of 2007 is regarded as a first step towards the dual earner - dual carer model by some scholars. Compared to previous reform, it introduced a shorter time span of receiving a child-raising benefit, a higher benefit and two additional months extending the reference period if both parents participate in child raising. This paper addresses the question what is the effect of the parent's money reform of 2007 on maternal employment rates? Using the SOEP, an ex-post impact evaluation with difference-in-difference estimator and propensity score matching is done to investigate causal effects of the reform on the employment rates of mothers. The results reveal that the mothers giving birth under the new reform start significantly earlier working than mothers bearing a child under the old reform, but the number of working mothers did not increase. This observation results in the conclusion that the parent's money reform did not fulfill its role as a driver towards a shift the dual earner - dual carer model. Future policies should have an explicit holistic approach to improve the reconciliation of work and family life

Return Migration and the 'Healthy Immigrant Effect'

According to the "healthy immigrant effect" (HIE), immigrants upon arrival are healthier than locally born residents. However, this health advantage is supposed to diminish or even disappear over a relatively short period and the immigrants' health status is converging to that of the natives. The causes for this gradient of immigrants' health are subject to an ongoing discussion and the underlying trajectories are not yet fully understood. This paper investigates whether return migration can serve as an additional explanation for the declining health of immigrants, and thus aims at shedding some light on the trajectories underlying the HIE. The data used are drawn from 13 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel. Using a random-effects probit model, this analysis explores the factors influencing re-migration by means of a sample of 4,426 migrants. In line with the existing literature, the study shows that e.g. having spouse and children in the home country, or being non-working or jobless yield a higher return probability, whereas all factors associated with attachment to Germany (e.g. language fluency, German citizenship, house ownership) reduce the probability of re-migration. Additionally, the results indicate that men reporting poorer health ('good', 'satisfactory', 'poor' or 'bad') are significantly less likely to return home relative to male immigrants who describe their health as 'very good'. However, for women, the effects are adverse to that of men, and none of the health coefficients for women is significant. Hence - at least for men - re-migration can be seen as an additional explanation for the HIE

Analyzing Regional Variation in Health Care Utilization Using (Rich) Household Microdata

This paper exploits rich SOEP microdata to analyze state-level variation in health care utilization in Germany. Unlike most studies in the field of the Small Area Variation (SAV) literature, our approach allows us to net out a large array of individual-level and state-level factors that may contribute to the geographic variation in health care utilization. The raw data suggest that state-level hospitalization rates vary from 65 percent to 165 percent of the national mean. Ambulatory doctor visits range from 90 percent to 120 percent of the national mean. Interestingly, in the former GDR states doctor visit rates are significantly below the national mean, while hospitalization rates lie above the national mean. The significant state-level differences vanish once we control for individual-level socio-economic characteristics, the respondents' health status, their health behavior as well as supply-side state-level factors

Explaining Reurbanization: Empirical Evidence of Intraregional Migration as a Long-Term Mobility Decision from Germany

Following the discussion on reurbanization (changing intra-regional migration patterns), our research project treats transport-related consequences of this spatial development in German city regions. The hypothesis is that reurbanization bears potential to spread environmentally friendly ways of organizing daily mobility - but that the chance of those positive effects might be given away, if policy does not accompany the process adequately. The aim of this project is to assess the current impact of reurbanization on passenger transport in city regions and to find further potential to reduce motorized passenger kilometres in order to deduce first planning approaches. This paper focuses on the question whether a household decides to move or to stay in its current dwelling and also analyses how the results vary in time and space. After having deduced factors on the decision to move, a logistic regression is run on the SOEP-data. The analysis shows that observed differences in time are mainly due to difference in behaviour regarding the factors number of employed persons and the event birth whereas spatial variation is mainly due to structural differences

The Effect of Education on Fertility: Evidence from a Compulsory Schooling Reform

This study analyzes the effect of education on the number of children, childlessness, and the timing of the first birth. We use exogenous variation from a mandatory reform to compulsory schooling in West Germany to deal with the endogeneity of schooling. In contrast to studies for other developed countries, we find a significant negative effect of education on completed fertility. We attribute this finding to the particularly high opportunity costs of child-rearing in Germany

Maternal Employment and Happiness: The Effect of Non-Participation and Part-Time Employment on Mothers' Life Satisfaction

In contrast to unemployment, the effect of non-participation and parttime employment on subjective well-being has much less frequently been the subject of economists' investigations. In Germany, many women with dependent children are involuntarily out of the labor force or in part-time employment because of family constraints (e.g., due to lack of available and appropriate childcare). Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Study, this paper analyzes the impact of involuntary familyrelated non-participation and part-time employment on mothers' life satisfaction. Controlling for unobserved individual fixed effects, I find that both the pecuniary effects (foregone earnings) and the non-pecuniary effects (psychological costs) are significantly negative. Compensating income variations reveal that the residual household income would have to be raised by 182 percent (157 percent/77 percent) in order to just offset the negative effect of not being able to work because of family constraints (of being in short/long part-time employment). Moreover, in terms of overall happiness among mothers, non-participation is revealed to be a more serious problem than unemployment