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 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...

Bullying is a widespread social phenomenon. We show that both children who are being bullied and children who bully suffer in terms of long-term outcomes. We rely on rich survey and register-based data for children born in a region of Denmark during 1990-1992, which allows us to carefully...

This paper investigates the effects of school starting age on crime while relying on variation in school starting age induced by administrative rules; we exploit that Danish children typically start first grade in the calendar year they turn seven, which gives rise to a discontinuity in...

This paper estimates how peers' achievement gains are affected by the presence of potentially disruptive and emotionally sensitive children in the school-cohort. We exploit that some children move between schools and thus generate variation in peer composition in the receiving school-cohort. We...

There is a large gender gap in advanced math coursework in high school that many believe exists because girls are discouraged from taking math courses. In this paper, we exploit an institutional change that reduced the costs of acquiring advanced high school math to determine if access is, in...

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...

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...