TY - JOUR A1 - Jessen, Jonas A1 - Spiess, C. Katharina A1 - Waights, Sevrin A1 - Wrohlich, Katharina T1 - The gender division of unpaid care work throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany JF - German economic review N2 - 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 in the division of care work increased to some extent in the beginning of the pandemic, it returned to the pre-pandemic level in the second lockdown almost nine months later. These results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic neither aggravated nor lessened inequality in the division of unpaid care work among mothers and fathers in any persistent way in Germany. KW - gender division KW - domestic work KW - child care KW - day care KW - gender care gap KW - COVID-19 Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/ger-2022-0003 SN - 1465-6485 SN - 1468-0475 VL - 23 IS - 4 SP - 641 EP - 667 PB - De Gruyter CY - Berlin ER - TY - RPRT A1 - Huber, Katrin A1 - Rolvering, Geske T1 - Public child care and mothers’ career trajectories T2 - CEPA Discussion Papers N2 - This paper studies the effect of public child care on mothers’ career trajectories. To this end, we combine county-level data on child care coverage with detailed individual-level information from the German social security records and exploit a set of German reforms leading to a substantial temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three. We conduct an event study approach that investigates the labor market outcomes of mothers in the years around the birth of their first child. We thereby explore career trajectories, both in terms of quantity and quality of employment. We find that public child care improves maternal labor supply in the years immediately following childbirth. However, the results on quality-related outcomes suggest that the effect of child care provision does not reach far beyond pure employment effects. These results do not change for mothers with different ‘career costs of children’. T3 - CEPA Discussion Papers - 64 KW - child care KW - maternal employment KW - career costs of children KW - women’s careers Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-587310 SN - 2628-653X IS - 64 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bauernschuster, Stefan A1 - Borck, Rainald T1 - Formal Child Care and Family Structure: Theory and Evidence JF - CESifo economic studies : a joint initiative of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and Ifo Institute for Economic Research N2 - This article studies the effect of child care provision on family structure. We present a model of a marriage market with positive assortative matching, where in equilibrium, the poorest women stay single. Couples have to decide on the number of children and spousal specialization in home production of public goods and child care. We then study how child care provision affects the equilibrium. Due to specialization in home production, the incentive to use child care is smaller for married mothers than for single mothers. We show that this increases the number of single mothers and the divorce rate. Using survey data from Germany, we present suggestive empirical evidence consistent with this finding. (JEL codes: J12 and J13). KW - marriage KW - divorce KW - single parenthood KW - child care Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/cesifo/ifv025 SN - 1610-241X SN - 1612-7501 VL - 62 SP - 699 EP - 724 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER -