A Multilevel Analysis of Child Care and the Transition to Motherhood in Western Germany

Karsten Hank and Michaela Kreyenfeld

No 290, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: In this paper, we take a multilevel perspective to investigate the role of child care in the transition to motherhood in Germany. We argue that in the European institutional context the availability of public day care and informal child care arrangements should be a central element of the local opportunity structure regarding the compatibility of childrearing and women's employment. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we apply a multilevel discrete time logit model to estimate first birth risks of western German women. While we find that access to informal care arrangements increases the probability of entering parenthood, we do not find any statistically significant effect of the public day care provision. This result probably points to shortcomings in the specific institutional set-up of the German daycare regime, and to the existence of potentially relevant unobserved dimensions of child care.

Keywords: child care; fertility; multilevel analysis; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 p.
Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.38635.de/dp290.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:diwwpp:dp290

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().