Should Mama or Papa Work? Variations in attitudes towards parental employment by country of origin and child age. Comparative Population Studies, Vol. 48: 339-368 (with Ludovica Gambaro, C. Katharina Spiess and Katharina Wrohlich).

Abstract Employment among mothers has been rising in recent decades, although mothers of young children often work fewer hours than other women do. Parallel to this trend, approval of maternal employment has increased, albeit not evenly across groups. However, differences in attitudes remain unexplored despite their importance for better understanding mothers’ labour market behaviour. Meanwhile, the employment of fathers has remained stable and attitudes towards paternal employment do not differ as much as attitudes towards maternal employment do between socio-economic groups. This paper examines attitudes towards maternal and paternal employment. It focuses on Germany, drawing on data from the German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA). The survey explicitly asks whether mothers and fathers should be in paid work, work part-time or full-time, presenting respondents with fictional family profiles that vary the youngest child’s age. Unlike previous studies, the analysis compares the views of respondents with different origins: West Germany, East Germany, immigrants from different world regions, and second-generation migrants in West Germany. The results highlight remarkable differences between respondents from West and East Germany, with the former group displaying strong approval for part-time employment among mothers and fathers of very young children and the latter group reporting higher approval for full-time employment. Immigrant groups are far from homogenous, holding different attitudes depending on their region of origin. Taken together, the results offer a nuanced picture of attitudes towards maternal and paternal employment. We discuss these findings in relation to labour markets participation in Germany.


Passport to Progress: The Effects of Birthright Citizenship on Siblings’ Education. Accepted at Economics of Education Review.

Abstract This paper analyzes family spillovers of birthright citizenship in Germany. By using difference-in-differences and event study methodologies on large-scale survey datasets, I examine the direct impact of citizenship on immigrant children and its spillover effects on the educational achievements of their older siblings who were born before the reform. The findings reveal educational benefits for immigrant children, and positive spillover effects on their older siblings' academic achievements. Children are 13 percentage points more likely, and their older siblings are 6 percentage points more likely, to complete secondary school with the highest degree. The spillovers can be attributed to a considerable increase in parental investments in the siblings' education and increased naturalization of parents and older siblings. Consequently, this study suggests that previous evaluations of citizenship have underestimated its benefits.


The Generational Gift: The Effects of Grandparental Care on the Next Generations’ Health and Well-being (with Mara Barschkett and C. Katharina Spiess). R&R at Health Economics.

Abstract Health and well-being in the family context can be affected by care giving arrangements. Following parental care and daycare, grandparents are the third most important care givers for children in many Western societies. Despite the relevance of grandparental care, there is little evidence on the causal effects of this care mode on the next generations' health and well-being. In this paper, we fill this gap by investigating the causal impact of regular grandparental care on the self-reported health and (domain-specific) satisfaction of both parents and children. To do so, we exploit geographic distance to grandparents as a source of arguably exogenous variation and use representative German panel data for families with children under the age of eleven. Our results suggest positive effects on parental satisfaction with the child care situation, as well as mothers' satisfaction with their leisure time. However, we also find negative effects on children's health, particularly for elementary school aged children and for boys.


How information affects parents’ beliefs and behavior: Evidence from first-time report cards for German school children (with Ariel Kalil).

Abstract Most parents overestimate their children's skills and performance in school. As parental misperceptions are more frequently found in less-advantaged families, they can exacerbate educational inequality, since parents' beliefs about their children's current performance influence their investments in their children's skill development. This paper capitalizes on exogenous variation in report card distribution across federal states in Germany to examine whether information from teachers regarding a child's performance affects parental beliefs and behavior and if so how this differs by subject and group. Our findings indicate that school information boosts parents' behavioral investments in child skill-building while having a limited impact on their beliefs. This finding suggests that receiving information from schools can be valuable as it reinforces the importance of educational activities for parents. We further find that numerical information treatments are more impactful than verbal treatments, that subsequent treatments are less potent than the initial treatment, and that school information only boosts parental investment when teachers hold accurate beliefs about children's skills.


The Economic Impact of Advance Child Support: Financial Well-being, Labor Supply, and Consumption of Single-Parent Households (with Sophia Schmitz).

Abstract About one in five children across OECD countries lives in single-parent households, many of which receive no financial support from the non-resident parent. To address this, several countries have introduced public advance child support schemes. This paper investigates the impact of such payments on the financial well-being, labor supply decisions, and household spending patterns of single-parent families, drawing on a major reform to Germany’s advance child support program that substantially expanded both benefit duration and eligibility in 2017. Using representative data from the German Microcensus and the Income and Expenditure Survey, we find these payments to improve families’ financial situations without crowding out private child support. Since eligibility was tied to economic independence of single-parent households, the reform also led to a decrease in the probability of receiving welfare benefits, which appears to be driven by exits from welfare due to increases in labor supply at the intensive rather than the extensive margin. We also find changes in expenditure patterns of affected families, with increased spending on food and beverages as well as goods related to the human capital development and well-being of children.