Volume 12, Issue Supplement

The objective of making it easier for parents to successfully balance career and family has recently taken on heightened importance for German family policy. In the last few years, reforms have been implemented in German care policies. In this contribution, we systematically review and evaluate German care policies before and after the implementation of these reforms. We start by discussing international research and then explore German evaluation studies on parental leave benefits, on publicly financed childcare before and after school entry, and on elderly care policies. Finally, we examine the extent to which some measures implemented conflict with another objective of family policy: that of providing an environment for a successful development of children. The paper concludes with an outlook on future research, discussing points that should be kept in mind in further German evaluation studies.

In a separate-property jurisdiction, marriage may induce domestic cooperation, and enhance efficiency in the production of children, because it may lend credibility to the prospective main earner’s promise to compensate the main childcarer at some future date, when the children will no longer be economically dependent on them. In a community-property jurisdiction, marriage will induce domestic cooperation, and enhance efficiency in the production of children, because it rules out strategic behavior. Whatever the matrimonial property regime, reducing the cost or difficulty of obtaining a divorce will have no permanent effect on the divorce rate. In separate-property jurisdiction, it will encourage marriage, and induce more married women to specialize in market work. Couples should be allowed to choose the matrimonial property regime.

Recent research shows that health at birth is affected by many factors, including maternal education, behaviors, and participation in social programs. In turn, endowments at birth are predictive of adult outcomes, and of the outcomes of future generations. Exposure to environmental pollution is one potential determinant of health at birth that has received increasing attention. A large literature outside of economics advocates for “Environmental Justice,” and argues that poor and minority families are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards. I provide new evidence on this question, showing that children born to less educated and minority mothers are more likely to be exposed to pollution in utero and that white, college educated mothers are particularly responsive to changes in environmental amenities. I estimate that differences in exposure to toxic releases may explain 6% of the gap in incidence of low birth weight between infants of white college educated mothers and infants of black high school dropout mothers.

A substantial increase in the availability of data on psychosocial traits in large representative longitudinal samples has opened up new areas of research for economists and new opportunities for collaborations with psychologists. As an example, I incorporate personality into alternative economic models of marriage, with individual traits associated with either productivity in home or market sectors, or preferences for household public goods. Empirically, personality traits have robust effects on individual propensities to marry and to divorce in a representative sample of the German population. Changes in these patterns across cohorts are consistent with a shift in the principal sources of marital surplus from production complementarities to consumption complementarities in the past few decades. Some personality traits related to divorce are also related to limited self-control in other domains, and suggest that departures from rational action should be considered in models of family behavior. In general, further analysis of the impact of personality and other psychological indicators on family relationships may improve our understanding of variation in partnership and parental decision-making, and of their responses to policy and to institutional environments.