Sons, daughters, wives, and the labour market outcomes of West German men

Hyung-Jai Choi, Jutta M. Joesch and Shelly Lundberg

Labour Economics, 2008, vol. 15, issue 5, 795-811

Abstract: We find a strong association between family status and labor market outcomes for recent cohorts of West German men in the German Socio-Economic Panel. Living with a partner and living with a child both have substantial positive effects on earnings and work hours. These effects persist in individual fixed effects models that control for correlation in time-invariant unobservables that affect both family and work outcomes, though the inclusion of length of marriage reduces the effects of children. Child gender also matters -- a first son increases fathers' work hours by 100Â hours per year more than a first daughter, and positive effects of sons on work hours and earnings are particularly strong for men with higher levels of education. There is evidence of son "preference" in the probability that a German man is observed to be coresiding with a son -- men are more likely to remain in the same household with a male child than a female child.

Keywords: Child; gender; Fatherhood; Labor; supply; Family (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927-5371(07)00056-5
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:labeco:v:15:y:2008:i:5:p:795-811

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().