We estimate the impact of youth minimum wages on youth employment by exploiting a large discontinuity in Danish minimum wage rules at age 18, using monthly payroll records for the Danish population. The hourly wage jumps up by 40 percent at the discontinuity. Employment falls by 33 percent and...

This paper documents a large association between individuals' time discounting in incentivized experiments and their positions in the real-life wealth distribution derived from Danish high-quality administrative data for a large sample of middle-aged individuals. The association is stable over...

How do households respond to job loss, and which self-insurance channels are most important? By linking customer data from the largest bank in Denmark with information from government administrative registers, we quantify a broad range of responses to job loss in a unified empirical framework....

We link survey data containing Danish people’s perceptions of where they rank in various reference groups and fairness views with administrative records on their income history, life events, and reference groups. People know their income positions well, but believe others are closer to...

A Danish tax reform, decided in May 2009 and taking effect from the beginning of 2010, lowered the marginal tax rate on top bracket taxable income from 63% to 56%. Because contributions to pension accounts are tax deductible, the reform provided an incentive to increase pension contributions...

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...

An emerging consensus is that labor force participation is more responsive to taxes and transfers than hours worked. To understand the implications of participation responses for the welfare analysis of tax reform, this paper embeds this margin of labor supply in an explicit welfare theoretic...

This paper analyzes the general nonlinear optimal income tax for couples, a multidimensional screening problem. Each couple consists of a primary earner who always participates in the labor market, but makes an hours-of-work choice, and a secondary earner who chooses whether or not to work. If...

This paper explores the optimal income tax treatment of couples. Each couple is modelled as a single agent supplying labor along two dimensions: primary-earner and secondary-earner labor supply. We consider fully general nonlinear income tax schedules which creates a multi-dimensional screening...