Andreas STEINHAUER

Bio :

I am currently a Lecturer in the School of Economics at The University of Edinburgh. I've completed my PhD in economics at the University of Zurich in 2014, where I studied under Josef Zweimueller. I also hold a B.A. and M.Sc. from the same university. During my PhD studies I spent half a year as a visiting student researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, invited by David Card. My fields of interest are mainly labour and family economics, mostly with an applied focus. My publications are “The Demand for Social Insurance: Does Culture Matter?”, which was joint work with B. Eugster, R. Lalive, and J. Zweimueller, published in the Economic Journal 121(556), 413—448, November 2011, and “Parental Leave and Mothers' Careers: The Relative Importance of Job Protection and Cash Benefits”, which was joint work with R. Lalive, A. Schlosser, and J. Zweimueller, published in the Review of Economic Studies 81(1): 219—265, 2014.

My current research interests are as follows:

My research interests are currently mostly at the intersection of labour and family economics. I'm working on a project looking at the relationship between female labour force participation and fertility with a particular focus on the costs potential mothers face when working when the child is below school age. The puzzling result I'm trying to shed some light on is that the fertility-work relationship is positive in the cross-country dimension, while the traditional Becker model predicts a negative relationship. I'm using detailed Swiss census data to disentangle institutional factors (child care etc.) from intrinsic motivations. To anchor the latter, I'm drawing on an emerging strand of the literature focusing on the importance of identity or psychological factors in the decision process of economic actors.

In related work, joint with Arna Vardardottir from Copenhagen Business School, we study assortative mating and how the recent trend of increasing assortativeness (mostly measured by education) can be reconciled with contemporaneous changes in female employment. We draw on detailed Swiss data. We're able to use tax records comprising income and wealth data for a large panel of Swiss households. This allows us to go beyond the current literature in directly measuring how assortativeness in education relates to pre-marriage earnings and post-marriage labour supply.

I'm also working on extending previous research on the effects of changes in parental leave systems, in particular, changes in the duration of paid and protected leaves. So far most research on parental leave focuses on the labour market effects on mothers. In this project, the goal is to focus on employers and how parental leave systems change employers' incentives regarding the hiring of (potential) mothers.

I hope to pursue the following additional ideas in the future:

Using unique comprehensive labour supply and income data in Switzerland I'm thinking about a project looking at classic questions in labour and family economics like the added worker effect. Due to the rich data it might be possible to extend the literature in the direction of measuring changes in labour supply, wealth and consumption behaviour due to income shocks to family members. A related idea is to look at how search (intensity/effectiveness?) is affected by the family. In a sense, the family is the strongest network available, yet potentially quite overlapping in terms of contacts. Using the Swiss data, it might be possible to learn something about the ways in which individuals' search for jobs is affected by the partner's income and network.