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.


Does Grandparenting Pay off for the Next Generations’ Health and Well-being? (with Mara Barschkett and C. Katharina Spiess)

Abstract Grandparents act as the third largest caregiver for children after parental care and daycare in Germany, as in many Western societies. Adopting a double-generation perspective, we investigate the causal impact of this care mode on parental well-being and children's overall health as one dimension of child well-being. We analyze age-speci c e ects based on a representative German panel data set and exploit arguably exogenous variations in geographical distance to grandparents. Our results suggest positive e ects on parental satisfaction with the childcare situation and mothers' satisfaction with leisure. In contrast, our results point to negative e ects on children's health in the short run. If children three years and older are in full-time daycare or school and, in addition, regularly cared for by grandparents, they have worse health outcomes.


Passport to Progress: The Effects of Birthright Citizenship on Siblings’ Education

Abstract This paper estimates family spillovers of granting birthright citizenship to immigrant children in Germany. By utilizing event study and difference-in-differences approaches and large-scale survey data sets, I examine the direct impact of citizenship on immigrant children and its spillover effects on the education of their older siblings who were born before the reform to provide a comprehensive account of the benefits associated with citizenship. The findings reveal educational benefits for immigrant children, and positive spillover effects on the academic achievements of their older siblings, which can be attributed to the considerable increase in investments made by parents in the siblings' education. Consequently, the results suggest that previous evaluations of citizenship have underestimated its advantages.