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Divorce marks the legal endpoint of a marital union. While divorce is increasingly seen as a ‘clean break’, the past marital history of the couple may nevertheless shape their present conditions. In particular, there may be a legacy of a highly gendered division of labour during marriage that may affect the ex-spouses’ earning trajectories beyond the date of divorce. Using register data from the German Pension Fund, we examine the earning trajectories of heterosexual couples who filed for a divorce in 2013 (24,616 men and 24,616 women). Using fixed-effects and matching techniques, we compare the earning trajectories of divorcees with those of a control group of married persons in the period spanning two years before and two years after divorce. In particular, we examine how the earner models divorcees followed during marriage shaped their future earning trajectories. Our results show that, on average, the earnings of a divorced woman in a male breadwinner constellation increased after divorce, while the earnings of her male ex-spouse declined. Nevertheless, large gender differences in earnings persisted: 2 years after separation, a divorced woman who had been in a male breadwinner constellation was, on average, earning 72% less than her ex-spouse. We discuss our findings against the background of recent policy reforms in Germany, which assume that ex-partners should be economically ‘self-reliant’ after divorce.
Second Birth Fertility in Germany: Social Class, Gender, and the Role of Economic Uncertainty
(2023)
Building on a thick strand of the literature on the determinants of higher-order births, this study uses a gender and class perspective to analyse second birth progression rates in Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1990 to 2020, individuals are classified based on their occupation into: upper service, lower service, skilled manual/higher-grade routine nonmanual, and semi-/unskilled manual/lower-grade routine nonmanual classes. Results highlight the “economic advantage” of men and women in service classes who experience strongly elevated second birth rates. Finally, we demonstrate that upward career mobility post-first birth is associated with higher second birth rates, particularly among men.
Extended cure survival models enable to separate covariates that affect the probability of an event (or `long-term' survival) from those only affecting the event timing (or `short-term' survival). We propose to generalize the bounded cumulative hazard model to handle additive terms for time-varying (exogenous) covariates jointly impacting long- and short-term survival. The selection of the penalty parameters is a challenge in that framework. A fast algorithm based on Laplace approximations in Bayesian P-spline models is proposed. The methodology is motivated by fertility studies where women's characteristics such as the employment status and the income (to cite a few) can vary in a non-trivial and frequent way during the individual follow-up. The method is furthermore illustrated by drawing on register data from the German Pension Fund which enabled us to study how women's time-varying earnings relate to first birth transitions.
Family characteristics are associated with individuals’ health and wellbeing. However, the link between family structure (e.g., operationalized via marital status) and health outcomes is ambiguous, and whether family climate mediates the relationship is unclear. This study uses the Biobehavioral Family Model (BBFM) to investigate the association of older adults’ family structure with later health, the mediating role of family climate and mental health and how these links vary by socioeconomic status (SES). Using data from n = 29,457 respondents aged over 50 in Waves 4, 5 and 6 (2011, 2013 and 2015) of the Survey of Health, Retirement and Ageing in Europe (SHARE), the BBFM was applied in a longitudinal mediation analysis of family structure and health, including both indicators of mental and physical health. Structural equation modeling was applied, and a multigroup analysis was performed to test the role of SES in a moderated mediation. Family climate and mental health mediated the relationship between family structure and subsequent physical health. Good levels of family climate were found to be consistently associated with improved mental and physical health. These relationships were significantly moderated by SES, showing that the association of family climate and health was weaker for those in low SES positions. Family climate and mental health should be considered as potential mechanisms linking family structure to later physical health outcomes across time; however, these associations are diminished for those with low SES.
Family lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in European Societies: Introduction to the Special Issue
(2022)
Objective: This chapter introduces the reader to the Special Issue "Family Lives during the COVID-19 Pandemic in European Societies".
Background: This Special Issue analyses how families, parents, and children have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they have been coping with its related challenges in different societal contexts.
Method: The studies collected in this Special Issue are based on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches and data that have been gathered during 2020 in a range of European countries. It covers the first lockdown period, the reopening phases, and the months thereafter.
Results: The 20 contributions of this Special Issue show that families shouldered large responsibilities during the pandemic. While the pandemic did not lead to radical shifts in gendered care patterns, mothers and fathers experienced the pandemic differently, with mothers reporting higher levels of stress. Moreover, there was great heterogeneity in how different types of families and children were affected by the pandemic. Single parents and parents and children in low-income households were most strongly affected in their social and economic wellbeing. Social and economic distress are strongly interwoven, and the developments during the pandemic aggravated existing social disparities.
Conclusion: This Special Issue underlines the importance of the family for the functioning of societies during times of crisis. It also shows that policy makers often adopted a too narrow view of what constitutes a family and did not adequately address family diversity in their decision making. This Special Issue furthermore emphasized that there is a danger that the pandemic will increase disparities between families. Thus, parents and their children need adequate support measures that are tailored to their needs, and that are designed to alleviate these social, economic and educational disparities.
Der Beitrag beschreibt die Grundzüge des sozialstrukturellen Wandels der Lebensformen in Deutschland. Zunächst werden Konzepte und theoretische Ansätze zur Erklärung von Lebensformen und familialen Verhaltensweisen skizziert. Anschließend werden Strukturen und Wandel der Lebens- und Familienformen in Ost- und Westdeutschland nach 1990 auf der Grundlage des Mikrozensus und des deutschen Beziehungs- und Familienpanels (pairfam) empirisch untersucht. Dargestellt werden die altersspezifische Verteilung der Lebensformen, der Wandel der Familienformen von Frauen und Männern seit den 1990er Jahren sowie bildungsspezifische Entwicklungen. Weiterhin beleuchtet der Artikel an den Beispielen des Übergangs zur Mutterschaft und der nichtehelichen Lebensgemeinschaft die kohortenspezifi sche Lebenslaufdynamik von Familienformen. Schließlich wird mit Stieff amilien ein in der empirischen Forschung bislang wenig untersuchter Aspekt der Differenzierung der Familienformen aufgegriffen.
Germany is one of the few countries in Europe that has implemented a system of ‘divorce splitting’. Under this system, the pension credits that spouses have accumulated during their marriage are combined and then split equally between them upon divorce. This study examines how divorce affects public pension entitlements in Germany, and how these patterns are influenced by the system of divorce splitting. The data for our analysis comes from SHARE-RV, a direct linkage of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) with administrative data of the research data centre of the German Pension Insurance Fund (Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund). The data include information on the beneficiaries’ monthly earnings and employment biographies, as well as on their pension entitlements and the credits they received through divorce splitting. The results of the analysis, which was restricted to West German men and women born between 1935 and 1954, reveal that there are large gender gaps in public pension benefit levels. However, the investigation also shows that single and divorced West German women have larger personal pension entitlements than their married or widowed counterparts. Furthermore, the public pension entitlements of divorced men and women in West Germany are very similar. This can be attributed partially to the divorce-splitting system, which tends to increase the pension benefits of divorced women, while reducing the pension benefits of their male counterparts.