Consequences of mixed provision of child care : an overview on the German market

Universal child care that is available, affordable and of good quality is regarded as a key instrument of a country's social and labor market policy. As full public involvement in the provision of child care is costly, licensing non-public providers can enlarges parental choice and relieve public funds. This paper analyzes the consequences of universal, mixed-market provision of child care for availability and quality by directly comparing public providers to various non-public providers such as welfare organizations, churches and commercial providers. Controlling for regional and socio-demographic differences in participation, results show that non-religious and in particular commercial providers serve the under three-year-olds and respond to the demand for full-day care. Furthermore, they employ more personnel with a tertiary education. Hence, commercial providers can - at least when covering rather low market shares - increase parental choice and contribute to the provision of high-quality child care

Institutional childcare : an overview on the German market

Institutional early childhood education and care can be funded and delivered in various ways relying on both the public and the private sector. The provision of childcare ranges from public operation to mixed markets with public and private providers to considerably marketised systems with predominantly private providers. One of the countries with a mixed childcare system is Germany where most of the childcare centres are operated by local authorities and non-profit organisations. Using newly available statistical data this paper provides a descriptive overview on the market for childcare in Germany from a providers' perspective. It answers the question if providers differ systematically with regard to centre characteristics, staff employed or the children taken care of. As the results show, the differences in operation affect many dimensions, nevertheless non-religious and for-profit centres on the one hand as well as public and religious centres on the other hand tend show similar characteristics

School entrance recommendation : a question of age or development?

According to school entry regulations in most countries, the composition of school entrance cohorts is determined by a fixed cutoff date. This procedure creates inter-cohort differences in age and development which can severely influence educational trajectories. Developmental examinations at school entry might be an instrument to mitigate these differences by delaying school entry for children with developmental impairments. Using data on the compulsory school entrance screening in the German federal state of Brandenburg, this paper shows that age and developmental status are the major influencing factors for a child's probability to receive a school recommendation. Younger children and children with impairments in cognitive, socio-emotional and motor development as well as health are less likely to be recommended. Delaying school entry allows them to improve, although their developmental status remains below average. School entrance examinations thus allow for some harmonization of school cohorts with respect to age and developmental differences

Dips and floors in workplace training : using personnel records to estimate gender differences

Using personnel records from a single large German firm in the financial industry, this paper provides detailed evidence on the effect of age and the supervisor's gender on gender differences in workplace training, holding constant various workplace characteristics. We implement an age-specific decomposition of the incidence and the duration of training into three terms: an age-specific coefficients effect, an age-specific characteristics effect, and an age composition effect. Our results show that the gender training gap changes with age. Females obtain less training during the early career, and their training occurs at higher age. The timing of the gender training gap seems to be driven by diverging career paths associated with employment interruptions. However, we find no evidence for catching-up effects after parental leave. A decomposition of the training gap including supervisor fixed effects reveals that supervisors do not treat male and female employees differently. Supervisors assign more training to all employees if they themselves participate more in training

Returns to continuous training in Germany: new evidence from propensity score matching estimators

The present paper examines the wage effects of continuous training programs using individual-level data from the German Socio Economic Panel (GSOEP). In order to account for selectivity in training participation we estimate average treatment effects (ATE and ATT) of general and firm-specific continuous training programs using several state-of-the-art propensity score matching (PSM) estimators. Additionally, we also apply a combined matching difference-in-differences (MDiD) estimator to account for unobserved individual characteristics (e.g. motivation, ability). While the estimated ATE and ATT for general training are significant ranging between about 4 and 7.5 %, the corresponding wage effects of firm-specific training are mostly insignificant. Using the more appropriate MDiD estimator, however, we find a more precise and highly significant wage effect of about 5 to 6 %, though only for general training and not for firm-specific training. These results are consistent with standard human capital theory insofar as general training is associated with larger wage increases than firm-specific training. Furthermore, we conclude that firms may intend to use specific training to adjust to new job equirements, while career-relevant changes may be conditioned to general training

Duration and Intensity of Kindergarten Attendance and Secondary School Track Choice

This paper investigates the relationship between kindergarten attendance and secondary school track choice in West-Germany. Our analysis is based on a panel of 12 to 14-year olds with information from age two on, drawn from the German SocioEconomic Panel (GSOEP) 1984–2005. We estimate binary probit models to assess the impact of the duration (in years) and the intensity (half-day or full-day) of kindergarten attendance. Our results indicate that kindergarten non-attendance is associated with a significantly lower probability to attend the highest secondary school track (“Gymnasium”). Further, full-day attendance is associated with a decreasing probability of attending the highest secondary school track for every duration of preschool child care. Thus, intensity seems to matter more than duration

Determinants of Child Care Participation

When estimating the determinants of child care participation, the simultaneity in mothers' decision to work and in the decision to use child care is a major challenge. In this study, we provide evidence on the determinants of institutional child care use accounting for the endogeneity of mothers' labor supply by applying an instrumental variables approach. This endogeneity has been neglected in studies on this issue so far, even though the decision to use child care outside the home is strongly connected to mothers' decision to work after childbirth and vice versa. Based on the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP) from 1989-2006 we show that children living in Western Germany have a higher probability to attend institutional care if their mothers increase their actual weekly working time. Estimating the determining factors of child care participation without correcting for simultaneity underestimates the influence of maternal working time by more than a half

Fast Hearing-Threshold Estimation Using Multiple Auditory Steady-State Responses with Narrow-Band Chirps and Adaptive Stimulus Patterns

This paper describes the estimation of hearing thresholds in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired subjects on the basis of multiple-frequency auditory steady-state responses (ASSRs). The ASSR was measured using two new techniques: (i) adaptive stimulus patterns and (ii) narrow-band chirp stimuli. ASSR thresholds in 16 normal-hearing and 16 hearing-impaired adults were obtained simultaneously at both ears at 500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz, using a multiple-frequency stimulus built up of four one-octave-wide narrow-band chirps with a repetition rate of 40 Hz. A statistical test in the frequency domain was used to detect the response. The recording of the steady-state responses was controlled in eight independent recording channels with an adaptive, semiautomatic algorithm. The average differences between the behavioural hearing thresholds and the ASSR threshold estimate were 10, 8, 13, and 15 dB for test frequencies of 500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz, respectively. The average overall test duration of 18.6 minutes for the threshold estimations at the four frequencies and both ears demonstrates the benefit of an adaptive recording algorithm and the efficiency of optimised narrow-band chirp stimuli

Return and risk of human capital contracts

Human capital contracts give private investors the right to a share of students' future earnings in return for a financial contribution during their studies. Although still rarely used, human capital contracts could not only help to complement limited public funding for higher education but might also be an alternative to traditional financial assets. Using a dataset covering 1% of German households for the period 1995-2009, we analyse the return and risk properties that can be expected from human capital contracts. We find that funds of human capital contracts provide low risk exposures to stocks and bonds. As a result, risk-adjusted returns of funds of human capital contracts are significantly positive under fairly weak conditions. Thus, human capital contracts potentially offer large diversification benefits for investors and might be a way to improve the state's educational budget