C. Katharina Spiess

Interactions between care-giving and paid work hours among European midlife women, 1994 to 1996

This paper uses data from the European Community Household Panel surveys of 1994 and 1996 to study the association between changes in care-giving and changes in weekly work hours. Our sample comprises women aged 45–59 years who participated in the labour force in at least one of the two years studied. Controlling for country variation, we find significant relationships between starting or increasing informal care-giving and changes in weekly work hours. No such association is found however among women terminating a care-giving commitment or reducing their care hours. Starting care-giving significantly reduces work hours for women in northern European countries (except Ireland). By contrast, women in southern Europe and Ireland respond to an increase in care-giving hours by a smaller increase or a higher decrease in work hours than non care-givers. In summary, our results show that the impact of care-giving on adjustments of weekly work hours is asymmetrical and that it differs in southern and northern Europe.

The Liberalization of Maternity Leave Policy and the Return to Work after Childbirth in Germany

German federal law has increased the potential duration of maternity leave five times since 1985. A theoretical model demonstrates that the cumulative return probability at potential duration cannot decline unless the mothers employment conditions or career expectations change. We estimate return to work hazards from the German Socio-Economic Panel for women bearing children in the period 1984–1991 and predict cumulative return probabilities for first-time mothers and mothers with a previous birth. The pattern of cumulative return probabilities as potential duration increases is consistent with the hypothesis that employment conditions or career expectations frequently change for mothers taking longer leaves.

Pollution exposure and child health: Evidence for infants and toddlers in Germany

This paper examines the impact of outdoor pollution and parental smoking on childrens health from birth until the age of three years in Germany. We use representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), combined with five air pollution levels. These data were provided by the Federal Environment Agency and cover the years 2002-2007. Our work makes two important contributions. First, we use European data to replicate and extend an important US study by following the effects of pollution exposure and parental smoking on child health during the first four years of life. Second, we have health measures not only for infants but for toddlers as well. For infants, as well as for two- to three-year-olds, we are able to account for time-invariant and unobserved neighborhood and maternal characteristics. Our results suggest a significantly negative impact of some pollutants on infant health. High exposure to CO prior to birth causes, on average, a 289g lower birth weight. With respect to toddler health, we find that disorders and in particular those as bronchitis and respiratory illnesses are affected particularly by O3 levels.

Towards a Framework for Assessing Family Policies in the EU

This report presents the results of a first attempt to create a framework for assessing the performance of national family policies. The report is part of a joint EU and OECD project, which aims to help the EU Government Expert Group on Demographic Issues in evaluating national family policies. The idea behind the framework is that it allows individual countries to compare their overall performance in the area of family policies with the performance of other countries. The main focus of the report is policies for families with smaller children. The framework provides a set of cross-nationally comparable indicators on contexts, policy measures, and outcomes, organised on a systematic basis. The policy measure indicators presented in the report cover leave schemes, early childhood education and care, family benefits and workplace policies. The indicators build upon, inter alia, previous work by the OECD in various studies on family-friendly policies that were carried out on a cross-national basis using different sets of indicators. Most of these indicators are today available in the OECD Family Database. Wherever the OECD Family Database contains indicators for the majority of EU member states and OECD countries, these data have been used in the present study. Otherwise, data from other cross-national databases have been included. Each indicator in the framework is presented as a single-standing indicator in the general absence of scientific consensus on different aggregation weights. In the report no explicit ranking of countries has been attempted, instead the relative position of countries has been illustrated with the help of standard deviation scores. In the last part of the report the linkages between policy aims and the various context, outcome and policy measures are indicated, which help construct “score cards”. This “score card-approach” is illustrated for three countries: Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom. The report offers tools for assessment that may be developed further, and should offer an approach to using the OECD Family Database, acknowledging this unique data source for cross-country comparisons in the field of family policy. Ce rapport presente les resultats d’une premiere tentative d’elaborer un cadre d’evaluation de la performance des politiques nationales en faveur des familles. Ce rapport fait partie d’un projet elabore conjointement par l’Union europeenne et l’OCDE, qui vise a aider le groupe d’experts gouvernementaux sur les sujets demographiques de l’UE pour evaluer les politiques nationales d’aides aux familles. L’idee sous-jacente est de permettre a chaque pays de comparer ses performances avec celles des autres pays. Les familles avec de jeunes enfants sont le principal sujet d’analyse de ce rapport. Le cadre elabore propose un ensemble d’indicateurs comparables entre pays sur les contextes, les mesures politiques et les resultats, organises sur une base systematique. Les indicateurs de mesures politiques couvrent les dispositifs de conge, d’aides a l’education et aux soins accordees a la petite enfance, les prestations financieres et les politiques liees au lieu de travail. Ces indicateurs ont ete elabores, inter alia, a partir des travaux anterieurs de l’OCDE sur les politiques favorables aux familles qui ont ete conduites de maniere comparative sur la base de differents ensembles d’indicateurs. La plupart de ces indicateurs sont aujourd’hui disponibles au sein de la base de donnees OCDE sur les Familles. Ces indicateurs ont ete inclus pour la majorite des pays de l’UE et de l’OCDE pour lesquels ils sont disponibles. Lorsqu’ils n’etaient pas disponibles, des donnees provenant de bases internationales ont ete prises en compte. Chaque indicateur est presente ici de facon separee, car il n’y a pas de consensus scientifique sur la ponderation qui permettrait de les agreger. Aucun classement explicite des pays n’a ete tente ici ; la position relative des pays est, au contraire, illustree au moyen de scores d’ecarts-types. Dans la derniere partie du rapport, les liens entre les objectifs politiques et les variables de contexte de resultats et de mesures politiques sont pris en compte pour elaborer des « cartes de score ». Cette approche par « cartes de scores » est illustree pour trois pays : le Danemark, l’Allemagne et le Royaume-Uni. Ce rapport offre des outils d’evaluation qui pourront etre encore developpes, et devrait offrir une approche de la maniere d’utiliser la base de donnees de l’OCDE sur les Familles, qui constitue une source de donnees incontournable pour faire des comparaisons internationales dans le champ des politiques familiales.

Obesity and Developmental Functioning Among Children Aged 2-4 Years

In developed countries, obesity tends to be associated with worse labor market outcomes. One possible reason is that obesity leads to less human capital formation early in life. This paper investigates the association between obesity and the developmental functioning of children at younger ages (2-4 years) than ever previously examined. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study are used to estimate models of developmental functioning in four critical areas (verbal skills, activities of daily living, motor skills, and social skills) as a function of various measures of weight (including BMI and obesity status) controlling for various child and family characteristics. The findings indicate that, among boys, obesity is a significant risk factor for lagged development in verbal skills, social skills, and activities of daily living. Among girls, weight generally does not have a statistically significant association with these developmental outcomes. Further investigations show that the correlations exist even for those preschool children who spend no time in day care, which implies that the correlation between obesity and developmental functioning cannot be due to discrimination by teachers, classmates, or even day care providers.

Parental leave benefits and breastfeeding in Germany: effects of the 2007 reform

While the health benefits of breastfeeding for both mothers and children are well known, breastfeeding may make it difficult for mothers to return early to the labor market. Maternity and parental leave regulations have been designed to reduce this conflict. In 2007, Germany put into effect a new parental leave benefit (Elterngeld). The related reform increased the number of parents eligible for benefits and changed the amount and duration of the benefits. The reform sought to decrease the pressure to return to the labor market soon after childbirth, especially for those parents who did not benefit under the old system. The current paper investigates whether this reform of parental leave impacted breastfeeding initiation and duration in Germany. We draw on representative survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) from 2002 through 2012. Three breastfeeding measures are exploited 1) breastfeeding at birth or no breastfeeding initiation; 2) breastfeeding for at least four months; and 3) breastfeeding for at least six months. We find no effect of the Elterngeld reform on breastfeeding initiation or breastfeeding for at least six months, but do find an effect on breastfeeding for at least four months. Applying a difference-in-difference approach, it is shown that mothers who were not affected by the reform did not change their breastfeeding behavior. Breastfeeding duration increased among mothers who benefited from the reform. The results were robust over various sensitivity tests including placebo regressions and controlling for regional indicators, among others. Thus, our empirical results provide evidence that the reforms goal of allowing parents to spend more time with their children during the first year of life also impacted breastfeeding behavior.

Die Förderung von Kindertageseinrichtungen —eine Analyse ihrer verteilungspolitischen Konsequenzen

Kinderbetreuung kann durch Eltern, Verwandte, Tagespflegeeltern, Au-Pairs und nicht zuletzt in einer Kindertageseinrichtung erfolgen. Sie kann offentlich oder privat finanziert werden. Sieht man einmal vom Erziehungsgeld ab, so wird in Deutschland die Betreuung von Kindern in privaten Haushalten, durch soziale Netzwerke, Babysitter, Kinderfrauen und meist auch in der Tagespflege privat finanziert. Im Gegensatz dazu wird die Betreuung in Kindertageseinrichtungen in erster Linie offentlich finanziert. Zwar werden Elternbeitrage erhoben; diese betragen — im gesamtdeutschen Durchschnitt — jedoch weniger als 10 Prozent der entsprechenden Ausgaben der offentlichen Hand (Statistisches Bundesamt 2000).2

Family Instability and Locus of Control in Adolescence

Abstract Investigating the impact of family instability is important as more and more children experience different family changes in many industrialized countries. In this paper we examine the dynamics of family structure, looking at the potential effect of yearly maternal partnership transitions on adolescents’ locus of control. We aim at combining research on family instability with research on non-cognitive skill formation. We use rich and nationwide German data to identify the relationship between family instability and adolescent locus of control. Combining entropy balancing with a novel econometric method to assess potential bias from omitted variables, we find that experiencing maternal partnership transitions is negatively associated with adolescents’ belief in self-determination and that internal locus of control is reduced by about a fifth of a standard deviation among those affected, even after conditioning on a large number of covariates. This is particularly true if the transitions take place during “middle childhood.”

Relations Among Maternal Life Satisfaction, Shared Activities, and Child Well-Being

Maternal well-being is assumed to be associated with well-being of individual family members, optimal parenting practices, and positive developmental outcomes for children. The objective of this study was to examine the interplay between maternal well-being, parent-child activities, and the well-being of 5- to 7-year-old children. In a sample of N = 291 mother-child dyads, maternal life satisfaction, the frequency of shared parent-child activities, as well as children’s self-regulation, prosocial behavior, and receptive vocabulary were assessed using several methods. Data were collected in a special study of the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), a representative longitudinal survey of private households in Germany. Using structural equation modeling, significant positive direct and indirect relations between maternal life satisfaction, frequency of shared parent-child activities, children’s self-regulation, prosocial behavior, and receptive vocabulary were found. The more satisfied the mother was, the more she shared activities with her child and the more the child acted prosocially. Furthermore, the higher the frequency of shared parent-child activities, the higher the child scored in all three analyzed indicators of children’s well-being: self-regulation, prosocial behavior, and receptive vocabulary. The current study supports the assumption of maternal well-being as the basis of positive parenting practices and child well-being.

Information asymmetries between parents and educators in German childcare institutions

ABSTRACT Economic theory predicts market failure in the market for early childhood education and care (ECEC) due to information asymmetries. We empirically investigate information asymmetries between parents and ECEC professionals in Germany, making use of a unique extension of the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). We compare quality perceptions by parents and by professionals across 734 institutions. We detect considerable information asymmetries that differ across quality measures but less so by parental socio-economic background or center characteristics. Both similarly contribute to explaining variations in the information gap. We conclude that information is not readily available to parents; an issue that should be addressed by policy-makers.