Ongoing Research
How Gender Role Attitudes Shape Maternal Labor Supply | Tim Mensinger
Abstract | Working Paper | Interview | Gender Prize 2025, WiSo Faculty University Hamburg (EUR 500)
We examine the influence of gender role attitudes, specifically views about the appropriate role of mothers, on post-childbirth employment decisions. German panel data reveals that mothers with traditional attitudes are 15% less likely to work during early motherhood than their egalitarian counterparts. Differences also emerge at the intensive margin and are persistent for at least seven years. Fathers' attitudes also predict maternal labor supply, highlighting joint decision-making within couples. Examining the interaction of attitudes with policies, we find that the introduction of a cash-for-care payment for parents who abstain from using public childcare substantially reduced the labor supply of traditional mothers, whereas egalitarian mothers' labor supply remained unaffected. To examine counterfactual policy changes, we estimate a dynamic model of female labor supply that incorporates human capital accumulation and, as a novel feature, heterogeneity by gender attitudes. Labor supply elasticities are substantially larger for traditional mothers, while a policy facilitating full-time childcare access has a more pronounced effect on egalitarian mothers. Our findings stress that gender role attitudes moderate the impact of policies, which implies that measured average policy effects depend on the distribution of attitudes and, hence, cannot easily be transferred over time or to other countries. Abstract | Working Paper | Coverage: Wirtschaftswoche 23, 2023 | Coverage: FAZ Aug 2024
Remote work expanded persistently after the Covid-19 pandemic. We study whether this increased job flexibility reduced household specialization in the Netherlands, where the pandemic’s childcare demand spike was transitory, isolating remote work’s effect. Using time-use and administrative data from 2016–2023 and a difference-in-differences design exploiting pre-pandemic remote work potential, we find each additional hour of potential raised parental childcare by about 10 minutes. As fathers have higher potential, the childcare gender gap narrowed by one-third, especially where only fathers could work remotely. Mothers in these households also increased market work. Thus, remote work can promote more equitable household labor division. Abstract | Working Paper | Online Appendix | Replication Package
This paper analyzes the stability and distribution of ambiguity attitudes using a broad population sample. Using six waves of data, a structural stochastic choice model yields three individual-level parameters: ambiguity aversion, ambiguity-induced insensitivity, and the magnitude of decision errors. These parameters are heterogeneous across individuals, but stable over time and across the domains of financial markets and climate change. We summarize heterogeneity using a discrete classification approach with four types. We label these types as being near ambiguity neutral, ambiguity-averse, ambiguity-seeking, or erratic. Observed characteristics vary between groups in plausible ways. Ambiguity types predict risky asset allocation, even after controlling for covariates. Beliefs and Portfolio Choice in a Representative Population
Abstract | Working Paper | Policy Outreach Video
The amount of risk that households take when investing their savings has long-term consequences for their financial well-being. However, a substantial share of observed heterogeneity in financial risk-taking remains unexplained by factors like risk aversion and wealth levels. This study explores whether subjective beliefs about stock market returns can close this knowledge gap. I make use of a unique data set that comprises incentivized, repeated elicitations of stock market beliefs and high-quality administrative asset data for a probability-based population sample. Households with more optimistic stock market expectations hold more risk in their portfolio, where the effect size is about half of the effect size of risk aversion. Furthermore, changes in expectations over time are related to changes in portfolio risk, which demonstrates that cross-sectional correlations are not driven by a time-invariant third variable. The results suggest that stock market expectations are an important component of portfolio choice. More generally, the study shows that subjective beliefs can be reliably measured in surveys and are related to actual high-stakes decisions. Work in Progress
