Shared Parenting and Parents’ Income Evolution after Separation: New Explorative Insights from Germany

Christina Boll and Simone Schüller

No 1131, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: Based on panel data from 1997 to 2018, we investigate the socioeconomic preconditions and economic consequences of ‘shared parenting (SP)’ forms in Germany. Referring to the post-separation year, we build SP groups from information on child residence and fathers’ childcare hours during a regular weekday. We explore the short-term gender and SP group associations with economic well-being as well as, for mothers only, its medium-term associations in the five years after separation. Our findings indicate that around separation, intense SP is a superior strategy in terms of equivalized household income. This also holds true for mothers in the medium-term, but their earnings barely improve during that time. Mothers stay highly involved in childcare even in shared parenting settings and/or fail to redirect released childcare time to the labor market. Our data support the notion that even high resources do not shield mothers against remaining trapped in economic dependence post-separation.

Keywords: union dissolution; shared parenting; childcare; child residence; household income; earnings; household composition; SOEP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J14 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 p.
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.818135.de/diw_sp1131.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:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1131

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().