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Parental Child Care Time, Income and Subjective Well-Being: A Multidimensional Polarization Approach for Germany
Joachim Merz, Normen Peters ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5The study looks at how parental child care time and income together relate to the subjective well-being of adults in Germany. It introduces a new measure, called 2DGAP, that shows how many people fall into low or high groups on both time and income, and how strongly. It uses 21 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel and the German Time Use Surveys of 1991/92 and 2012/13. The outcome studied is adult well-being, not the well-being of children. It is therefore only indirectly related to child well-being.
Key points
- Compensation between parental child care time and income was significant.
- Some multidimensional regions showed no compensation: a deficit in parental child care time was not made up for by income.
- Multidimensional polarization, measured by headcount and intensity, increased significantly over the twenty years studied.
- Risk and intensity of polarization differed markedly between groups.
Limitations
The abstract measures the subjective well-being of adults, not outcomes for children, so it cannot show how parental time or income affects children. It also reports no details on effect sizes or on the quality of the child care.
Abstract
Neither market income nor consumption expenditure provides an adequate picture of individual standard of living. It is time which enables and restricts individual activities and is a further brick to a more comprehensive picture of individual well-being. In our study we focus on a prominent part of time use in non-market services: it is parental child care which contributes not only to individual but also to societal well-being. Within a novel approach we ask for multidimensional polarization effects of parental child care where compensation/substitution of time for parental child care versus income is interdependently evaluated by panel estimates of society's subjective well-being.The new interdependent 2DGAP measure thereby provides multidimensional polarization intensity information for the poor and the rich and disentangles the single time and income contribution to subjective well-being for targeted policies ensuring at the same time the interdependence of the polarization dimensions. Socio-economic influences on the polarization pole risk and intensity will be quantified by two stage Heckman estimates. The analyses are based on the German Socio-Economic Panel with 21 waves and robust fixed effects estimates as well as the German Time Use Surveys 1991/92 and actual 2012/13 with detailed diary time use data.Prominent result: compensation between parental child care time and income proved to be significant, but there are multidimensional regions with no compensation, where parental child care time deficit is not compensated by income. Interdependent multidimensional polarization by headcount and intensity increased significantly over the twenty years under investigation with remarkable risk and intensity differences.