Economic theory suggests that incentives matter for people's decisions. This paper investigates whether this also holds for less self-evident areas of life such as the timing of births. We make use of a nautral experiment when the German government changed its parental benefit system January 1, 2007. The policy changes strongly increased economic incentives for women to postpone delivery to the new year provided that they were employed. The incentives for women not employed were not the same, they could gain slightly from giving birth before the policy change. Applying a difference-in-difference-in-difference approach, we find very strong evidence that women with an employment history near to the end of their term indeed succeeded to shift births and became subject to the new and more generous parental benefit system. We estimate the quantitative impact to correspond to a 5-6 percentage points increased probability to give birth the first seven days of 2007 rather than the last seven days of 2006 for employed women.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Length: 20 pages Date of creation: 12 Oct 2009 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:hhs:uufswp:2009_010
Contact details of provider: Postal: Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P. O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden Phone: + 46 18 471 25 00 Fax: + 46 18 471 14 78 Email: Web page: http://www.nek.uu.se/ More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Katarina Grönvall).