This paper examines the impact of maternity leave legislation on first birth timing in Great Britain. When maternity leave was introduced in Great Britain in 1976, the eligibility requirement for full-time employees was to have been working for the same employer for at least 2 years. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), this paper examines whether women postponed first birth in accordance with tenure requirements for maternity leave. Higher transition rates to first birth are found for those who had acquired enough employer tenure to qualify for maternity leave than for those who did not yet qualify. However, the causal role of maternity leave legislation for first birth timing is uncertain, since transition rates to first birth began to diverge by employer tenure even before 1976.2
Purpose -The aim of this paper is to study employment effects of workfare and training programs for lone mothers receiving means-tested benefits in Germany. Design/methodology/approach -The empirical analyses are based on a large-scale administrative data set covering the entire population of unemployed means-tested benefit recipients. A timing-of-events approach is used to control for possible selectivity in program entries. Findings -Findings are that lone mothers particularly profit from participating in vocational training programs. It seems they can benefit from updating their job skills after having interrupted their employment for childcare. By contrast, workfare does not seem to be beneficial for those with young children. Workfare is especially intended to enhance participants' motivation to increase their job search efforts. The main reason lone mothers of young children have not been employed is however likely to be lack of childcare, rather than lack of motivation. Practical implications -Lone mothers of young children are perhaps not an adequate focus group for workfare, and should be assigned there less often, and instead more frequently to skill training programs. Originality/value -As of yet, very little research has investigated effects of training and workfare programs specifically for lone mothers in Germany. The findings from the present study can contribute to understanding whether lone mothers, who are strongly targeted by these programs despite facing employment obstacles on account of low levels of childcare provision, can actually profit from program participations.
In 2005, Germany implemented major welfare benefit reforms that encourage an adult worker model of the family. In this study, we hypothesised that, despite these reforms, women's assignments to activation programmes would in practice still tend to replicate the degree of labour market attachment to which they had become accustomed relative to their partner in the past. We compared programme entries between women in former male breadwinner, dual earner, no‐earner and female breadwinner households and applied event‐history analysis to large‐scale administrative data. Our findings showed that in western Germany – but not in eastern Germany – women's assignments to activation programmes indeed replicated their prior labour market attachment relative to their partner.
Key Practitioner Message: • Among women receiving Unemployment Benefit II in Germany, women with partners participate in activation programmes less often; • This tendency applies especially to western German women with less employment experience and lower former earnings than their partners; • A framework should be devised to inquire about previously non‐employed women's interests in ALMP participation and offer them such opportunities.
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