Henning Hermes

Early Child Care

During his stay at CESifo, Henning Hermes will work on analyzing the importance of universal child care for life outcomes and socio-economic inequalities within the child care system. With several research projects, he aims to shed light on what causes the difference in take-up of universal child care between lower and higher socioeconomic status (SES) families, how important child care is for the gender gap in labor market participation, and the role of discrimination in the child care market. Using various field experiments, Henning Hermes and his co-authors study the real-life context of the early child care landscape in Germany and derive policy implications on how to equalize access to early child care in order to provide equal opportunities for every child.

Building on this research, Mr. Hermes’ latest working paper (with Marina Krauß, Philipp Lergetporer, Frauke Peter and Simon Wiederhold) presents the first RCT evidence that access to universal early child care increases maternal full-time employment. In a randomized field experiment, the researchers provide families with young children information and personal assistance for child care applications. This treatment strongly increases child care enrollment of children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) families. As a consequence, 18 months after the intervention, treated mothers from lower-SES families are nine percentage points (about 160%) more likely to work full-time compared to lower-SES mothers from the control group. Moreover, the treatment leads to an increase in household income and mothers’ earnings, and substantially decreases within-household gender gaps in earnings and child care hours.

Henning Hermes is an applied behavioral and experimental economist at DICE, Heinrich-Heine-University of Düsseldorf, working on topics in education and inequality. For this research, he frequently uses field experiments but he also works with survey and lab experiments as well as secondary data. Before working in Düsseldorf, he spent four years as a postdoc at FAIR / The Choice Lab, NHH Bergen. Henning Hermes holds a PhD in Economics from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, where he also received his degrees in Psychology and Economics. His peer-reviewed papers have been published in internationally leading journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization and Experimental Economics. He is a research affiliate at CESifo, FAIR, CEPR and IZA.