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

Maximilian Sprengholz, Anna Wieber and Elke Holst

No 1799, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

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 household economic decisions for some time, even when these frameworks change.

Keywords: Gender identity; male breadwinner norm; institutions; female labor market outcomes; SOEP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 J12 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 p.
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-hme
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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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)
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