Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to hamper employment. This paper investigates the importance of incentives inherent in the tax-benefit system for the individual decision to take up work. Using German microdata over the period...

Families play an important role in providing insurance against adverse shocks, but little is known about how shocks affect the family structure itself. We study the impact of a labor market shock on divorce and intra-household allocation of resources, exploiting a naturalexperimental earthquake...

I study possible determinants of part-time employment among women in France and Germany using microdata of the Labour Force Survey. Voluntary part-time work is substantially more widespread among women in Germany than it is in France. Estimation results show that while the presence of children...

Gender gaps in labor-market outcomes often emerge with the arrival of the first child. We investigate a causal link between gender norms and labor-supply expectations within a survey experiment among 2,000 German adolescents. Using a hypothetical scenario, we document that the majority of girls...

We quantify the importance of precautionary labor supply using data from the German Socio- Economic Panel (SOEP) for 2001-2012. We estimate dynamic labor supply equations augmented with a measure of wage risk. Our results show that married men choose about 2.5% of their hours of work or one week...

Using information on desired and actual hours of work, we formulate a discrete choice model of constrained labor supply. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel and the microsimulation model STSM, we find that hours and participation elasticities are substantially smaller than those in the...