This paper examines the effects of universal daycare on mothers' labor force participation, full-time employment, and earnings over their working lifetime. I exploit differential access to daycare caused by a roll-out of daycare centers across Denmark in combination with rich administrative...

This dissertation consists of three self-contained chapters on universal early childhood education. They complement each other by investigating three different perspectives of a large-scale investment in the rollout of universal daycare in Denmark during the late 1960s and 70s. Prior to 1964,...

Over the last century, global life expectancy has increased tremendously. A longer planning horizon may change individuals' incentives to work, save, and marry but it has proven challenging to disentangle such incentive effects from those of improved health. In this paper, we study how...

We investigate the short-term impact of out-of-home care on child health, schooling and juvenile crime. Using an event study to examine the dynamics around the time of placement, we document a clear deterioration of mental health and increasing crime rates before placement. After placement, we...

Is the education-health gradient inflated because both education and health are associated with unobserved socio-emotional skills? Revisiting the literature, we find that the gradient is reduced by 30-45% by fine-grained personality facets and Locus of Control. Traditional aggregated Big-Five...

This paper uses register based data covering the entire population of Danish children enrolled in preschool in 2006-2007 to investigate whether the gender composition of preschool staff members affects the timing of school start and subsequent academic performance. To estimate effects of the...