This study analyzes the effect of education on the number of children, childlessness, and the timing of births. We use exogenous variation from a mandatory reform of compulsory schooling in West Germany to deal with the endogeneity of schooling. In contrast to studies for other developed...

This paper examines the causal effects of a major change in the German parental leave benefit scheme on fertility. I use the unanticipated reform in 2007 to assess how a move from a means-tested to an earnings-related benefit affects higher-order births. By using the German Mikrozensus 2010, I...

This paper focuses on the role of home country's birth rates in shaping immigrants' fertility. We use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to study completed fertility of first generation immigrants who arrived from different countries and at different times. We find that women from countries...

This paper focuses on the role of the home country’s birth rates in shaping immigrant fertility. We use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to study completed fertility of first generation immigrants who arrived from different countries and at different time. We apply generalized Poisson...

We use reforms in the Swiss public retirement system to identify the responsiveness of retirement timing to financial incentives. A permanent reduction of retirement benefits by 3.4 percent induces more than 70 percent of females to postpone their retirement. The responsiveness of male workers,...

Using SOEP data (1984-2006) we analyze the role of parental background for transitions to tertiary education in Germany and answer three questions: (a) does the relevance of parental background shift from short-term (contemporary income) to long factors (ability, parental education) at higher...

This paper reviews the research on the effects of the recent reform of the parental leave benefit system (Elterngeld) in Germany on fertility. I start with a brief discussion of the economic incentives of the reform and their potential effects on fertility from a theoretical perspective. Then I...

This paper focuses on the role of home country’s fertility culture in shaping immigrants’ fertility. I use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to study completed fertility of first-generation immigrants who arrived from different countries and in different years. The variation in total...

This paper investigates the effect of education on fertility under inflexible labor market conditions. We exploit exogenous variation from a German compulsory schooling reform to deal with the endogeneity of education. By using data from two complementary data sets, we examine different...

We study the development of teenage fertility in East and West Germany using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel and from the German Mikrozensus. Following the international literature we derive hypotheses on the patterns of teenage fertility and test whether they are relevant to the German...