In this paper, I assess the employment and income effect of divorce for women in West Germany between 2000 and 2005. With newly available administrative data that allows me to adopt a causal approach, I find strong negative employment effects with respect to marginal employment and strong positive effects with respect to regular employment. However, in sum, the overall employment rate (marginal and regular employment combined) is not affected. Furthermore, the lower the labor market attachment before separation is, the more pronounced employment effects are. In addition, I also estimate the impact of divorce on daily gross incomes. I find no convincing evidence for an income effect. I conclude that a divorce might have a pure labor supply effect only.
Welfare state context, female labour-market attachment and childbearing in Germany and Denmark
(2014)
This study investigates the role of female labour-market attachment and earnings in childbearing progressions in two very different European contexts. By applying event-history techniques to German and Danish register data during 1981–2001, we demonstrate how female earnings relate to first, second and third birth propensities. Our study shows that female earnings are positively associated with first birth fertility in Denmark, while this is not the case in West Germany. We interpret our findings based on the fact that Danish social context and policy encourage women to establish themselves in the labour market before becoming mothers, while the German institutional context during the 1980s and 1990s was not geared towards encouraging maternal employment. For higher-order births, the results are less clearcut. For Denmark we find a slightly positive correlation between female earnings and second-birth fertility, while the association is somewhat negative for third-order births. In Germany, women tend to leave the labour market when becoming mothers. Non-employed mothers have elevated second and, in particular, third-birth rates. For the group of mothers who are employed, we find only a weak association between their earnings and higher-order fertility.
This paper investigates the role of women’s education in the transition to the second child using data from the 1997 German micro-census. We begin our analysis with a simple model, which shows a positive effect of woman’s education on the transition rate to the second child for West German women. We argue that this effect is most likely confounded by various factors. Firstly, we assume that there is a time-squeeze effect, which increases the transition rate to the second child for more highly educated women. Secondly, titled as the partner hypothesis, we argue that more highly educated women often live with more highly educated partners who have the earning potential to afford a large family. Thirdly, titled as the selection hypothesis, we argue that the positive effect of women’s education can be attributed to a selection effect, i.e. familyoriented college graduates are more likely to select themselves into the group of women
at risk of second birth. The empirical investigations particularly support the second and third hypotheses. After controlling for the partner’s characteristics and including unobserved heterogeneity factors, the positive effect of female education becomes strongly negative.