Early childhood education and care (ECEC) services are increasingly seen as holding the promise of promoting more equal life chances for children by supporting their development and encouraging parental employment. Research shows that ECEC can fulfil such potential, as long as provision is of high quality and reaches the most disadvantaged children. Yet there is ample evidence that disadvantaged children are less likely to attend ECEC institutions. When they do, they are enrolled into settings with lower quality and/or settings catering mostly to other children from disadvantaged families. This latter aspect, relating to settings’ composition, is rarely investigated, but the few existing studies suggest that disadvantaged children “do better in settings with a mixture of children from different social backgrounds”. This research project seeks to offer new evidence on the composition of ECEC settings, to explore the drivers of different levels of concentration of disadvantaged children, and to measure the impact of such levels of concentration on child development. The composition of ECEC settings will be measured in relation to migration status, a salient dimension of educational disadvantage in several European countries. The project focuses on the specific case of Germany, where ECEC attendance varies markedly in relation to both socio-economic status and place of residence. The analysis will draw on different data sources, combining survey data on children and the ECEC they attend with information at a highly disaggregate regional level in order to account for the neighbourhood context in which families live. By combining three levels of analysis – families, ECEC settings, and neighbourhoods – the study develops an multilayered approach which will enrich the child development literature on ECEC services as well as our understanding of educational disadvantage. The findings will strengthen evidence-based knowledge in policy making and service provision in Europe.

WEALTHTRAJECT is the first project to comprehensively and systematically examine diversity in long-term trajectories of wealth accumulation within and between social groups. Wealth inequality is on the rise in many affluent societies. It is time to move beyond prevailing static snapshots of average wealth inequality between people to understand this trend. Instead, a dynamic perspective on wealth changes experienced by people over their lifetimes is needed. This dynamic perspective reveals how diverse the trajectories of wealth accumulation are, i.e., the degree of trajectory variability. WEALTHTRAJECT integrates disconnected strands of literature to study how variability in trajectories emerges over time through the interplay of saving and spending of income, receipt of transfers from parents and other family members, and (de-)investment in (un-)profitable assets. WEALTHTRAJECT addresses four main innovative objectives: (i) to document variability in wealth trajectories over people's lives; (ii) to identify intragenerational drivers of variability in wealth trajectories; (iii) to establish the intergenerational relationships between family background and wealth trajectories; (iv) to collect novel life history data on wealth accumulation trajectories. To address these objectives, WEALTHTRAJECT innovates by adopting a novel approach emphasising the diverse patterns of wealth gains and losses in people's lives. The project challenges the prevalent idea of a uniform hump-shaped life cycle accumulation pattern in wealth. WEALTHTRAJECT breaks new ground by combining longitudinal data from surveys and registers and original life history data on wealth that, for the first time, allow the mapping of wealth trajectories over extended periods of people's lives. Advanced quantitative methods are applied to leverage the untapped potential of these data. WEALTHTRAJECT lays the foundations for a new understanding of wealth inequality to inform relevant social policies.

This project will estimate the impact of the gender split in parental leave on gender gaps in labour market outcomes and domestic work. I will address this topic, which is of Europe-wide policy relevance, by examining the parental leave policy in Germany. To provide causal estimates, I will make use of variation in the gender split in leave that is due to a cap in the income-related benefit payments at 1,800€ per month. A preliminary step for the analysis, is to confirm empirically that the cap in parental leave benefits does in fact induce variation in the gender split of leave. Following on from this, the main analysis will make use of differences in the gender split in leave that result specifically from the benefit cap in order to answer two questions: Question 1. What is the impact of the gender split in parental leave on the within-household gender gap in labour market outcomes (pay, hours, earnings and employment)? Question 2. What is the impact of the gender split in parental leave on the household division of domestic work and childcare? By answering these questions in a causal sense I address a literature gap in three areas. Firstly, there is currently no evidence on the effect of the gender split of parental leave on the gender gap in pay and only non-causal evidence for the effects on other labour market outcomes such as employment. Secondly, there is only non-causal evidence on the effects of the split of leave on the gender gaps in domestic work and childcare. Finally, there is no evidence on the effect of financial incentives on the split of leave and subsequent gender gaps in labour market outcomes and the division of domestic work and childcare.