Sena Coşkun

Prof. Sena Coşkun, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Macroeconomics and Labor Market Research at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. She studied Economics at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul (Turkey), received her Masters’ degree from Toulouse School of Economics (France), and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University (USA) in 2018. She was a postdoctoral researcher at University of Mannheim until she joined FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her research is on topics such as fertility, female labor supply and how these interact with macroeconomic business cycles.

Labor Shortages and Low Fertility: Female Labor Supply in Germany

This research project contributes to the research, mostly in the context of Germany, by analyzing female labor supply behavior with interdisciplinary dimensions; i.e. gender norms, taxes, childcare, and occupation choices to facilitate effective policy making. The hypothesis is that labor shortage problem in Germany could be addressed through higher maternal labor supply. For that, we need to understand gender in the German labor market and fertility dynamics, the effect of taxes and labor market institutions in detail. The second hypothesis is that as fertility and female labor supply are linked decisions, they should be analyzed jointly and a potential intervention to increase female labor supply might also address the low fertility problem as well. In fact, the current situation in Germany is that mothers do not (or cannot) work and working women do not (or cannot) give birth or postpone motherhood due to high child penalties.