August 23, 2013 | News

Congratulations!

On August 22, Sandra Krapf from the Laboratory of Economic and Social Demography successfully defended her dissertation with magna cum laude at the University of Rostock. In her thesis Sandra Krapf investigated if childcare provision has an effect on fertility behavior.

The first part of her dissertation was devoted to studying the determinants of childcare usage. Her investigation showed that in Sweden, a country with strong support for dual-earner families, usage was largely independent of mothers' education. However, in Western Germany, where the traditional family model is strongly supported, highly educated mothers were found to be more likely to use childcare than were mothers with lower levels of education.

In the second part of her dissertation, Sandra Krapf examined whether women living in a district of high childcare provision are having their first child earlier than women living in regions of low childcare supply. Previous research results on the effects of childcare provision on fertility behavior are inconclusive. Sandra Krapf has attributed this ambiguity to the fact that group specific differences had been neglected in the past. Her investigations show that in Germany childcare matters only for the behavior of highly educated women.