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.

Recently available data from online job vacancies have enabled analyses that move beyond across-occupation variation to also include within-occupation variation in workers’ task-specific skills. However, analyses of job vacancy data are limited by the fact that information on the hired worker(s) is hidden. To overcome this issue, I develop a novel, 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 the employment of skills and the returns to skills depend on the gender of the worker. I use the matched employer-employee-vacancy data to show that women face significantly lower returns to cognitive, character, customer service, financial, and specific computer skills when compared to men while controlling for both occupation and firm fixed effects.

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 shift represents an opportunity to assess the causal impact of child benefit programmes on the labour supply of mothers and fathers. As a new government was elected in late 2011, the reform was repealed after being in place for a single year, which allows us to assess long term effects of a temporary income shock that was perceived to be permanent. 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’ consultations with doctors regarding sterilisation, a common procedure in Denmark. Lastly, the labour supply effects of the reform are generally sustained for at least 3 years after its repeal.