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.

Nearly everyone experiences the death of a parent in adulthood, but little is known about the effects of parental death on adult children’s labor market outcomes and the underlying mechanisms. In this paper, we utilize Danish administrative data to examine the effects of losing a parent on individual labor market outcomes and its contribution to gender earnings inequalities. Our empirical design leverages the timing of sudden, first parental deaths, allowing us to focus on the health and family support channels. Our findings reveal that the death of a parent has enduring negative effects on the earnings of both adult sons and daughters, with the effects being more pronounced for daughters. Moreover, the negative impact of mothers' deaths on daughters' earnings outweighs that of fathers' deaths. Consequently, mothers' deaths can account for 10% of the aggregate gender earnings gap. Our analysis demonstrates that both the mental health and family support channels are at play. Specifically, we observe that women are relatively more inclined to seek psychological assistance, while men tend to receive more mental health-related and opioid prescriptions following the loss of a parent. Additionally, we find that women with young children experience a comparatively larger drop in earnings after parental death due to the loss of informal childcare.

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.

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. Our results suggest that there is little distinctive about being a child of immigrants, other than the fact that they are more likely to come from deprived backgrounds.

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.