We provide a novel decomposition of changing gaps in life expectancy between rich and poor into differential changes in age-specific mortality rates and differences in "survivability". Declining age-specific mortality rates increases life expectancy, but the gain is small if the likelihood of...

We decompose changing gaps in life expectancy between rich and poor into differential changes in age-specific mortality rates and differences in “survivability”. Declining age-specific mortality rates increases life expectancy, but the gain is small if the likelihood of living to this age is...

We study whether and how early labor market choices determine longer-run career versus family outcomes differentially for male and female professionals. We analyze the physician labor market by exploiting a randomized lottery that determines the sorting of Danish physicians into internships...

This paper studies how health behaviors and investments are shaped through intra- and inter-generational family spillovers. Specffically, leveraging administrative healthcare data, we identify the effects of health shocks to individuals on their family members' consumption of preventive care and...

Using full-population register data from Denmark, this study shows that estimates of the economic gradient in mortality depends on the specific measure of economic resources used, where we investigate permanent income, annual income or financial and housing wealth. Our favorite measure is what...

Parental divorce is a prevalent childhood event. A long literature attempts to estimate the impact of family dissolution on children's human capital formation. Previous studies applying sibling fixed effects estimators find that the timing of divorce has no direct effects on children's outcomes...

A large literature documents that childhood health shocks have lasting negative consequences for adult outcomes. This paper demonstrates that the adversity of childhood physical disability can be mediated by individuals' educational and occupational choices, which reflect their comparative...

Do the parties in a typical dispute face incentives similar to those in the classic prisoner's dilemma game? In this paper, we explore whether the costs and benefits of legal representation are such that each party seeks legal representation in the hope of exploiting the other party, while...

Strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fueled a long-standing debate over whether welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation. Some claim a causal relationship in welfare receipt across generations has created a...

How schooling affects cognitive skills is a fundamental question for studies of human capital and labor markets. While scores on cognitive ability tests are positively associated with schooling, it has proven difficult to ascertain whether this relationship is causal. Moreover, the effect of...