EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

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

Henry Ohlsson, Michael Neugart and ()
Additional contact information
Henry Ohlsson, Michael Neugart and: Uppsala Center for Fiscal Studies, Postal: Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P.O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden

Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Henry Ohlsson and Michael Neugart

No 2009:10, Working Paper Series, Center for Fiscal Studies from Uppsala University, Department of Economics

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.

Keywords: Timing of births; economic incentives; parental benefits; policy reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D19 H53 J13 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2009-10-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published as Henry Ohlsson, Michael Neugart and, 'Economic incentives and the timing of births: Evidence from the German parental benefit reform 2007' in Journal of Population Economics, 2013, pages 87-108.

Downloads: (external link)
http://ucfs.nek.uu.se/digitalAssets/129/129500_wp200910.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://ucfs.nek.uu.se/digitalAssets/129/129500_wp200910.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://ucfs.nek.uu.se/digitalAssets/129/129500_wp200910.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.uu.se/institution/nationalekonomiska/forskning/forskningscentrum/uppsala-center-for-fiscal-studies/digitalAssets/129/129500_wp200910.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Economic incentives and the timing of births: evidence from the German parental benefit reform of 2007 (2013) Downloads
Working Paper: Economic Incentives and the Timing of Births: Evidence from the German Parental Benefit Reform of 2007 (2012) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:uufswp:2009_010

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series, Center for Fiscal Studies from Uppsala University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P. O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Katarina Grönvall ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:hhs:uufswp:2009_010