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Germany is currently among the 10 oldest countries in the world, as measured by the share of population aged 70 years and over.With the baby boomer cohorts of the 1950s and 1960s having started to reach retirement ages, a new phase of ageing is about to take place. In this debate piece, we argue that investments in human capital at any age and at any stage of the life course are indispensable for dealing with an ageing population. Investments in early education are most effective and efficient, as early skills beget later skills. We show that in an ageing society, it is most efficient to invest in children from the very beginning to develop their full human potential, and to ensure that no child is left behind. Moreover, investments in early education programmes have benefits in addition to those directly related to children, including benefits related to fertility, maternal employment and the integration of parents with a migration background. Globally, more and more countries are faced with increasing proportions of older people and decreasing proportions of working-age people in their populations. Thus, what we describe here for Germany can in many respects be transferred to other country contexts.

Abstract
Social norms are put forward as a prominent explanation for the changing labour supply decisions of women. This paper studies the intergenerational transmission of these norms, examining how they affect subsequent female labour supply decisions, taking into account not only the early socialization of women but also that of their partner. Using large representative panel data sets from West Germany, results suggest that women with partners who grew up with a working mother are more likely to participate in the labour force, work longer hours and earn higher labour income. The main contribution of our study is that we assess a variety of potential mechanisms for this intergenerational link. We find no evidence that this finding reflects assortative mating; rather, analysis suggests that the partner's preferences are based on their experiences with the employment of their mothers and play a decisive role for the labour supply decision of partnered women. Moreover, we identify various effect heterogeneities, finding stronger associations for women with potentially less bargaining power. Our results suggest that policy measures supporting the labour force participation of today's mothers will increase the female labour force participation of the next generation.

This paper analyzes the influence of child health and maternal physical and mental health on female labor force participation after childbirth in Germany. Our analysis is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, which enables us to measure child health based on the occurrence of severe health problems including mental and physical disabilities, hospitalizations, and preterm births. Since child health is measured in SOEP at a very young age, we can rule out the reverse effects of maternal employment on child health that appeared in US studies. We investigate the influence of these indicators on various aspects of female labor force participation after childbirth within a two-year time period, including continuous labor force participation in the year of childbirth and the transition to employment in the year following childbirth. Since the majority of women in Germany do not go back to work within the first two years after childbirth, we also investigate their intention to return to work and their preferred number of working hours. We find that severe child health problems have a significant negative effect on maternal labor force participation and a significant positive effect on mothers' preferred number of working hours, while hospitalizations and preterm births have no significant effect. For maternal health, we find a significant negative effect of poor maternal mental and physical health on female labor force participation within a year of childbirth. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study of this kind using data from outside the US.

Abstract
Investigating the impact of family instability is important as more and more children experience different family changes in many industrialized countries. In this paper we examine the dynamics of family structure, looking at the potential effect of yearly maternal partnership transitions on adolescents' locus of control. We aim at combining research on family instability with research on non-cognitive skill formation. We use rich and nationwide German data to identify the relationship between family instability and adolescent locus of control. Combining entropy balancing with a novel econometric method to assess potential bias from omitted variables, we find that experiencing maternal partnership transitions is negatively associated with adolescents' belief in self-determination and that internal locus of control is reduced by about a fifth of a standard deviation among those affected, even after conditioning on a large number of covariates. This is particularly true if the transitions take place during "middle childhood."