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.

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.

On average, 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. This is different from the US where first-generation locals often have better unconditional outcomes. However, like the US, when we condition on parental socio-economic characteristics, first-generation locals generally perform as well or better than the children of locals. There is little distinctive about being a child of immigrants, other than the fact that they are more likely to come from deprived backgrounds.

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. 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. We find that a reduction in child benefits leads to a large increase in the labour supply of mothers; the effect on fathers is much smaller. Both mothers and fathers respond to the policy at the intensive margin, but the strongest response is from mothers at the extensive margin. The majority of the effects can be ascribed to fertility responses, but even after controlling for fertility-related family characteristics, we find significant increases in labour supply after the introduction of the reform. We confirm this result by using data on parents’ medical consultations regarding sterilisation, a common procedure in Denmark. Lastly, despite the fact that the policy was repealed in the year following its introduction, the reform appears to have had a long-lasting effect on labour supply.