Existing research documents substantial disparities in life outcomes between same-sex and different-sex attracted individuals, typically disadvantaging same-sex attracted individuals. We analyse how parental background relates to adult children’s earnings, health, fertility, and family formation by sexuality. To do so, we develop a new strategy to identify same-sex and different-sex couples in population-wide administrative data using joint financial commitments from Denmark. Our approach mitigates limitations associated with non-representative surveys and cross-sectional data on sexuality. Drawing on identity economics and minority stress theory, we propose a conceptual framework in which deviation from the social prescription of different-sex attraction generates identity costs that may decline with parental resources through reduced exposure to discrimination and enhanced coping capacity. Empirically, we find that disparities generally persist across the parental income distribution, though severe mental health conditions are particularly elevated among same-sex attracted individuals from low-income families. We explore parent-child relationships as potential mechanisms, finding that same-sex attracted individuals live farther from parents across the income distribution. Results are robust to controlling for unobserved parental heterogeneity through sibling fixed effects, but vary across childhood regions and cohorts. Our findings suggest that intergenerational mobility depends not only on factors shared by siblings but also on innate individual characteristics, such as sexuality.

Nearly everyone experiences the death of a parent in adulthood, but little is known about its effects on adult children’s labor market outcomes and the underlying mechanisms. In this paper, we use Danish administrative data to examine the impact of parental loss on individual labor market outcomes. We leverage the timing of sudden, first parental deaths and adopt a matched-control difference-in-differences strategy. Our findings show that parental death negatively affects adult children’s earnings: sons’ earnings decline by 2% five years after parental loss, while daughters’ earnings decrease by 3% during the same period. Exploring the underlying mechanisms, we find that both men’s and women’s mental health deteriorates following parental loss: women seek psychological assistance more frequently, while both men and women increase their use of mental health and opioid prescriptions. Furthermore, women with young children experience a comparatively larger earnings decline (around 4%) likely due to the loss of informal childcare. These findings collectively highlight a substantial labor market penalty for individuals who experience parental death.

We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation. Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental income, with the remainder due to differential rates of absolute mobility. The daughters of immigrants enjoy higher absolute mobility than daughters of locals in most destinations, while immigrant sons primarily enjoy this advantage in countries with long histories of immigration. Cross-country differences in absolute mobility are not driven by parental country-of-origin, but instead by destination labor markets and immigration policy.

We develop new facts on relationships between the timing and spacing of births, parental leave take-up, and labor market outcomes using Danish administrative data. We document substantial heterogeneity in age at first birth across maternal skill levels. Average spacing of pregnancies is also tighter for highly skilled mothers, resulting in higher fertility levels and time on parental leave soon after first birth. We estimate event studies by skill level and find that much of child penalties in earnings and participation after first birth can be explained by incapacitation effects from parental leave around subsequent births, especially for the highly educated.

Early-life shocks, such as the loss of a parent, can have lasting effects on inequality and human capital development. We study the effects of parental death during adolescence on both immediate and long-term outcomes, including education, mental health, criminal behavior, teenage pregnancy, and labor market performance. Using four decades of population-wide Danish administrative data and a difference-in-differences design with soon-to-be-treated children as controls, we provide causal evidence that parental death reduces high school graduation rates and tertiary educational enrollment while increasing the uptake of mental health treatment. Behavioral responses to parental death differ by gender: girls show an increased risk of teenage pregnancy, while boys demonstrate a higher likelihood of engaging in criminal activity. These more immediate effects lead to a long-term reduction in annual earnings. We find that living closer to grandparents, higher school quality, and a greater share of female teachers can mitigate some of these negative effects.

We show that vocational training is a key driver of social mobility for sons of locals, but less so for sons of immigrants in Denmark. To understand why, we examine whether access barriers can explain sons of immigrants' underrepresentation in traditional, high-return vocational fields. We develop a stylized theoretical model in which students choose between two vocational tracks: old traditional and new digital tracks, facing group-specific search frictions. When traditional sectors are harder to access for immigrant youth, our model predicts earlier switching into new digital tracks and potential welfare losses from misallocation…

Using four decades of individual linked administrative data from Denmark, we provide the first estimates of intergenerational transmission of victimization, focusing on violent crime. We find that, if a parent was victimized then the chances that a son is victimized double and the chances that a daughter is victimized treble. These associations hold for fathers and mothers and are stronger when the mother is victim. Introducing controls for cohort and neighbourhood fixed effects, parent’s socioeconomic status, parental cohabitation and whether the parent was a crime perpetrator explains about 60% of intergenerational transmission. The intergenerational link is significantly attenuated among families with above-median income, particularly for daughters.

This paper examines the interplay between firms' investments in digital skills and employment dynamics within the Danish labor market. We employ novel digital skill demand measures derived from online job postings using natural language processing techniques. We document a strong positive correlation between demand for digital skills, particularly in data science and AI, and firm productivity. Using dynamic lead-lag models, we estimate a positive relationship between digital skill investments and firm-level employment. This positive association is broad-based across skill levels and demographics, but stronger in certain occupations when specifically considering data science and AI skills. While digitalization drives job creation and productivity gains overall, the workforce impacts of specific technologies are heterogeneous. Our results suggest that digitalization, and particularly data science and AI adoption, may amplify existing labor market disparities across occupations, industries, and regions.

Analyses of job vacancy data are typically constrained by the fact that information on the hired worker(s) is hidden. To overcome this issue, I develop a pseudo-individual match between Danish job vacancy data and register data. With data on the hired worker(s) for each online job vacancy, I can test how returns to task-specific skills depend on the gender of the worker. While controlling for firm*occupation fixed effects, I find that women face significantly lower returns to cognitive, character, customer service, financial, and computer skills compared to men. The dual requirement of social and cognitive skills is not associated with higher wages at the individual level, but only after aggregating the data to teams of workers.

In Europe, the children of migrants often have worse economic outcomes than those with local-born parents. This paper shows that children born in Denmark with immigrant parents (first-generation locals) have lower earnings, higher unemployment, less education, more welfare transfers, and more criminal convictions than children with local-born parents. However, when we condition on parental socio-economic characteristics, first-generation locals generally perform as well or slightly better than the children of locals. While children of immigrants are more likely to come from deprived backgrounds, they do not experience substantially different outcomes conditional on parental background.

We analyze the contribution of job flexibility to the gender wage gap amongst Danish parents with a professional degree. We use a supervised machine learning approach to measure job flexibility from job vacancy text. We distinguish between employee-led and employer-led flexibility. We estimate pooled Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions to analyze the contribution of occupation-level exposure to flexibility to gender wage gaps. We find that employee- and employer-led flexibility contribute in opposite directions to the unexplained component of the motherhood penalty in earnings and wages for those with a professional bachelors degree.

Skill requirements in a job post reflect an employer’s “wish list,” but do they also reflect skills used on the job by the hired worker? We compare skill measures derived from the text of online job posts with individual-level data from the Danish Labour Force Survey (LFS) in which participants report their main skills used on the job as free text. By identifying individual workers from the LFS who can be matched to a job post, we validate that the extensive margin skills measures derived from job postings data reflect main skills used on the job. Thus, using job postings data to analyze skill use on the job is generally a valid empirical strategy. However, we also show that heterogeneity in returns to skills is missed if only the extensive margin of skill demand is considered.

In this paper, we exploit a unique and unexpected reform to the child benefit system in Denmark to assess the effects of child benefits on parental labour supply. A cap on child benefit payments in 2011 led to a non-negligible reduction in child benefits for larger families with young children while leaving child benefits for smaller families unchanged. The differential impact of this policy represents an opportunity to assess the causal impact of child benefit programmes on the labour supply of mothers and fathers. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the reduction in benefits leads to a substantial increase in the labour supply of mothers. Mothers respond to the policy at both the intensive and extensive margins, with the latter outweighing the former, and the effect persists after controlling for fertility-related family characteristics. To fix preferences for additional children across treatment and control groups, we use data on parents' medical consultations on sterilisation, a common procedure in Denmark.

Using discontinuities from the Danish college enrollment system, we find that students who are marginally accepted into their preferred program in a broad field that is different from their next-best choice (e.g., business rather than science) experience significant and long-lasting rewards as a result. In contrast, students whose preferred and next-best programs lie within the same broad field do not. Exploiting data from online job postings, we find that the estimated effects on skill usage similarly vary according to the degree of similarity between preferred and next-best choices.