Fertility and health insurance types in Germany

In this paper I study how different health insurance types in Germany alter the incentives to give birth. A stylized model illustrates that both the private and statutory health insurance can imply a higher number of births. While the family insurance in the latter clearly reduces the costs per child, income effects due to varying parental premia might operate in the opposite direction. If they are higher in the statutory health insurance, for instance, due to a selection of healthy individuals in the private health insurance, the latter might induce a higher number of births. Relying on data of the German Socio Economic Panel, I apply endogenous treatment effects models for count data to control for selection effects. Estimation results indicate that the private health insurance positively affects the number of births. The positive impact is robust across several alternative specifications.