Standard economic models which focus on pecuniary payoffs cannot explain why there are highly able individuals who choose careers with low pecuniary returns. Therefore, financial incentives are unlikely to be effective in influencing career choices of these individuals. Based on Akerlof and...

In this paper we test for risk compensation in wages using Danish panel data. With the conviction that the type of education is as important as the education length, we use a very detailed description of the type of education reached by the Danish population to calculate different measures of...

We analyse the extent of intergenerational transmission through parental capital, ethnic capital and neighbourhood effects on several aspects of the school-to-work transition of 2 nd generation immigrants and young ethnic Danes. The main findings are that parental capital has strong positive...

In this paper, we analyze immigrant wage gaps and propose an extension of the traditional wage decomposition technique, which is a synthesis from two strains of literature on ethnic/immigrant wage differences, namely the ?assimilation literature? and the ?discrimination literature?. We estimate...

Individuals match on length and type of education. We investigate whether the systematic relationship between educations of partners is explained by opportunities (e.g. low search frictions) or preferences (e.g. complementarities in household production or portfolio optimization). We find that...

Outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries has increased the focus on the accumulation of skills - such as Math skills - in high-wage countries. In this paper, we exploit a high school pilot scheme to identify the causal effect of advanced high school Math on labor market outcomes. The pilot...

We investigate the effect of immigrants' marriage behavior on dropout from education. To identify the causal effect, we exploit a recent Danish policy reform which generated exogenous variation in marriage behavior by a complete abolishment of spouse import for immigrants below 24 years of age....

Many OECD countries have implemented policies to induce couples to share parental leave. This paper investigates how responsive intra-household leave-sharing is to changes in economic incentives. To investigate this fundamental question, we are forced to look at one of the Nordic countries which...

In this paper we analyze investments in human capital assets in a way which is standard for financial assets, but not (yet) for human capital assets. We study mean-variance plots of human capital assets. We compare the properties of human capital returns using a performance measure and by using...

In this paper, we employ register data for eight cohorts of second-generation immigrant pupils to identify the impact of each parent's years since migration on their children's school achievements. We exploit local variation in years since migration and within-family variation. We find evidence...