Gender Identity and Wives' Labor Market Outcomes in West and East Germany between 1984 and 2016

Maximilian Sprengholz, Anna Wieber () and Elke Holst ()
Additional contact information
Anna Wieber: DIW Berlin
Elke Holst: DIW Berlin

No 12284, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We exploit the natural experiment of German reunification in 1990 to investigate if the institutional regimes of the formerly socialist (rather gender-equal) East Germany and the capitalist (rather gender-traditional) West Germany shaped different gender identity prescriptions of family breadwinning. We use data for three periods between 1984 and 2016 from the representative German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Density discontinuity tests and fixed-effects regressions suggest that married couples in West (but not East) Germany diminished the wife's labor market outcomes in order to avoid situations where she would earn more than him. However, the significance of the male breadwinner prescription seems to decline in West Germany since reunification, converging to the more gender-egalitarian East Germany. Our work emphasizes the view that political and institutional frameworks can shape fairly persistent gender identity prescriptions that influence house-hold economic decisions for some time, even when these frameworks change.

Keywords: institutions; male breadwinner norm; gender identity; female labor market outcomes; SOEP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 J12 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2019-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hme and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - published in: Socio-Economic Review (SER) , 2020, 18 (3), 1-23

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp12284.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender Identity and Wives’ Labor Market Outcomes in West and East Germany between 1984 and 2016 (2019)
Working Paper: Gender Identity and Wives' Labor Market Outcomes in West and East Germany between 1984 and 2016 (2019)
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:iza:izadps:dp12284

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().