The Impact of Family Friendly Workplaces on Satisfaction and Work

Verena Lauber and Johanna Storck

VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: This paper provides novel evidence on the effect of family-friendly firm policies on satisfaction and working time of parents. The focus of this study is on two specific firm policies: Childcare support and flexible working schedules. We exploit the fact that since the mid 2000s an increasing share of employers react to their employees' needs by offering a family-friendly work environment. These changes over time allow us to identify causal effects of the two family-friendly policies. Identification is based on a difference-in-differences strategy in a panel dataset on families with young children in Germany (FiD). The model is combined with matching to decrease potential bias arising from observable factors correlated with the offer of family-friendly policies and the change in the considered outcomes. We find that for mothers, childcare support strongly increases satisfaction related to childcare and additionally raises life and job satisfaction. Particularly middle and lower educated mothers increase their working time when childcare support is offered. The effects are mainly driven by immediate use of childcare support. Flexible working schedules only affect mothers' job satisfaction, but do not seem to change family related satisfaction and working time. Fathers show nearly no reactions to either childcare support or flexible working schedules. Childcare support seems to be a truly family-friendly practice and valued by mothers, while this is not so clear for flexible working schedules.

JEL-codes: J13 J21 J28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-hrm
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/145667/1/VfS_2016_pid_6619.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:vfsc16:145667

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().