There is a vast empirical literature investigating the effects of child care costs on female employment. Day care costs are usually treated as a reduction in female wages, which is supposed to negatively affect a woman's propensity to participate in the labor market. In this paper, we argue that...

This paper investigates whether and how regional social contexts influence fertility decisions of women living in western Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. It is argued that regional opportunity structures as well as local patterns of social interaction and culture may translate into...

To begin with, we sketch a general multilevel model of regional social contexts and individual family formation behavior, where particular attention is paid to the determinants of the actor's situation. Then a set of bridge hypotheses is proposed, on which the empirical investigation of the...

In this paper, we take a multilevel perspective to investigate the role of child care in the transition to motherhood in Germany. We argue that in the European institutional context the availability of public day care and informal child care arrangements should be a central element of the local...

Using data from the 2004 ?Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe? (SHARE), this paper continues and extends recent cross-national research on the proximity and contacts of elderly parents to their adult children. To begin with, we provide a brief description of the ?geography of the...

Objectives - Taking a cross-national comparative perspective, we investigate linkages between volunteer work, informal helping, and caring among Europeans aged 50 or older: Is the relationship between these activities characterized by complementarity or by substitution? Is there evidence for the...

Eine zentrale Rolle in der aktuellen Diskussion um eine bessere Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf spielt die Versorgung mit bedarfsgerechter Kinderbetreuung. Eine umfassendes Angebot an Betreuungsplätzen fördert jedoch nicht nur die Müttererwerbstätigkeit, sondern könnte sich auch positiv...

Dieses Paper zeigt, dass die Messung der Handgreifkraft ein auch in sozialwissenschaftlichen Bevölkerungsumfragen einfach zu ermittelndes, nicht-invasives und verlässliches objektives Gesundheitsmaß ist. Die Greifkraftmessung stellt nicht nur eine sinnvolle Ergänzung zu selbst berichteten...