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...

Whether couples pool their resources and behave like a unit or spend their income individually is crucial for social and tax policy. In this paper, I provide a test of the income pooling hypothesis using administrative cross-sectional survey data on expenditures and individual incomes of couple...

Using novel time-use data from Germany before and after reunification, we document two facts: First, spouses who both work full-time exhibit similar housework patterns whether they do so voluntarily or due to a full-time mandate, as in the GDR. Second, men's amount of housework is independent of...

Why do US college-educated couples with children marry at higher rates than those without a college degree? We argue that investing in children is more valuable for college-educated couples, who are more likely to send their children to college. Marriage, which entails lower separation risk and...

We use a unique dataset with bank clients’ security holdings for all German banks to examine how macroeconomic shocks affect asset allocation preferences of households and non-financial firms. Our analysis focuses on two alternative mechanisms which can influence portfolio choice: wealth...

This paper investigates the redistributive impact of private and public childcare provision and education on children's resources in Germany between 2009 and 2013. It takes account of the multidimensionality of children's needs and access to economic resources by applying an extended income...

Wie kann Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Familie gelingen – und zwar sowohl bei Frau-en als auch bei Männern? Ziel des Forschungsprojektes "Betriebliche Gelingensbedin-gungen einer partnerschaftlichen Aufteilung von Erwerbs- und Familienarbeit" war es herauszufinden, unter welchen Bedingungen...

More than 25 years after German reunification, key economic indicators for households living in eastern German regions are still below the western German levels. This particularly holds for private net wealth, which reaches only about 40% of the western German level. However, a more granular...

This paper explores the role of unilateral and idiosyncratic affection rents ("love") from being married with a specific individual in a matching model with individuals with heterogenous matching frequencies. We show that individuals suffer in expectation from being matched with individuals with...

Single parents and unmarried couples are increasingly replacing the traditional nuclear family. This paper investigates if the greater variety in living arrangements contributes to increased resource disparities among children in Germany. Children in single parent families are disadvantaged in...