J13 Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
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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’.
Paid parental leave schemes have been shown to increase women’s employment rates but decrease their wages in case of extended leave durations. In view of these potential trade-offs, many countries are discussing the optimal design of parental leave policies. We analyze the impact of a major parental leave reform on mothers’ long-term earnings. The 2007 German parental leave reform replaced a means-tested benefit with a more generous earnings-related benefit that is granted for a shorter period of time. Additionally, a “daddy quota” of two months was introduced. To identify the causal effect of this policy on long-run earnings of mothers, we use a difference-in-difference approach that compares labor market outcomes of mothers who gave birth just before and right after the reform and nets out seasonal effects by including the year before. Using administrative social security data, we confirm previous findings and show that the average duration of employment interruptions increased for high-income mothers. Nevertheless, we find a positive long-run effect on earnings for mothers in this group. This effect cannot be explained by changes in working hours, observed characteristics, changes in employer stability or fertility patterns. Descriptive evidence suggests that the stronger involvement of fathers, incentivized by the “daddy months”, could have facilitated mothers’ re-entry into the labor market and thereby increased earnings. For mothers with low prior-to-birth earnings, however, we do not find any beneficial labor market effects of this parental leave reform.
Expanding public or publicly subsidized childcare has been a top social policy priority in many industrialized countries. It is supposed to increase fertility, promote children’s development and enhance mothers’ labor market attachment. In this paper, we analyze the causal effect of one of the largest expansions of subsidized childcare for children up to three years among industrialized countries on the employment of mothers in Germany. Identification is based on spatial and temporal variation in the expansion of publicly subsidized childcare triggered by two comprehensive childcare policy reforms. The empirical analysis is based on the German Microcensus that is matched to county level data on childcare availability. Based on our preferred specification which includes time and county fixed effects we find that an increase in childcare slots by one percentage point increases mothers’ labor market participation rate by 0.2 percentage points. The overall increase in employment is explained by the rise in part-time employment with relatively long hours (20-35 hours per week). We do not find a change in full-time employment or lower part-time employment that is causally related to the childcare expansion. The effect is almost entirely driven by mothers with medium-level qualifications. Mothers with low education levels do not profit from this reform calling for a stronger policy focus on particularly disadvantaged groups in coming years.
Der vorgestellte Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über die gegenwärtige Hochschulfinanzierung in Deutschland; kürzlich haben einige Bundesländer Studiengebühren eingeführt, die zu einer teilweisen Finanzierung der Studienkosten beitragen sollen. Im II. Kapitel werden außerdem kurz die finanziellen Strukturen der tertiären Ausbildung in den OECD-Ländern beschrieben. Dabei geht es vor allem um die Kostenaufteilung zwischen öffentlichem und privatem Sektor. Im III. Kapitel werden dann die Verteilungswirkungen des gegenwärtigen Finanzierungssystems kritisch hinterfragt. Dabei wird auch auf den Lebenseinkommensvorteil einer Hochschulausbildung im Detail eingegangen, bevor dann mögliche Auswirkungen einer Gebührenfinanzierung diskutiert werden. Es wird deutlich hervor gehoben, dass die Einführung von Studiengebühren in eine umfassende hochschul- und bildungspolitische Strategie eingebettet sein muss, damit eine negative Selektionswirkung auf die Jugendlichen aus Haushalten mit prekären Einkommen vermieden wird.
The paper sheds some light on the education returns in Germany in the post war period. After describing higher education in Germany the current stand of higher education financing within the single states is presented. In six states tuition fees will be introduced in 2007/08 and discussions are going on in even some more. In the second part of the paper an empirical analysis is done using longitudinal data from the German social pension system. The analysis over the whole lifecycle renders results which proof that the higher education advantages are quite remarkable and might be a justification for more intensified financing by tuition fees. But all this has to be embedded into an encompassing strategy of tax and social policy, especially to prevent a strengthened process of social selection, which would be counterproductive for an increased and highly qualified human capital in Germany.