IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/uufswp/2009_010.html

Economic incentives and the timing of births: Evidence from the German parental benefit reform 2007

Author

Listed:
  • Henry Ohlsson, Michael Neugart and

    (Uppsala Center for Fiscal Studies)

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Henry Ohlsson, Michael Neugart and, 2009. "Economic incentives and the timing of births: Evidence from the German parental benefit reform 2007," Working Paper Series, Center for Fiscal Studies 2009:10, Uppsala University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:uufswp:2009_010
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://ucfs.nek.uu.se/digitalAssets/129/129500_wp200910.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D19 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Other
    • H53 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Welfare Programs
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • J18 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Public Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:uufswp:2009_010. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Katarina Grönvall The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Katarina Grönvall to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nekuuse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.