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Using annual data from 1978 through 2016, and monthly data from January 2005 through November 2017 from Denmark, we provide a precise estimate of the upper bound on the potential impact of the adoption of wind energy on the reduction of CO2 emissions from energy production. We separate causal impacts from endogenous effects in regressions using instrumental variables including average wind speed, and from spurious effects in dynamic systems using impulse-response analysis and cointegration techniques. A one percentage point increase in the share of wind in total energy production is found to cause a reduction in CO2 emissions of the order 0.3%, based on endogeneity-corrected regression, and 0.5% over 2 years in a fractional vector error-correction model, after allowing the cumulative effects to take place. This corresponds to an upper bound estimate of 0.69 tonnes of CO2 emissions avoided per additional MWh of wind energy produced. We find that after a structural break at the time of introduction of the EU ETS and the Kyoto Protocol in 2005, the country has been on track towards meeting its long-term goals for emission reduction and green energy production, but not before.

Using the 61st and 68th rounds of National Sample Survey data, we investigate the role of stigma, the economy’s structure, potential selection bias, and sectoral differences in explaining the low labor force participation (LFP) of middle and secondary educated women in India relative to low- and high-educated women (the “U-shape”). Estimating LFP regressions on a sample of prime-aged married women, we show that, controlling for background characteristics, if a woman’s husband works in a white-collar job in a region with a high share of blue-collar jobs, she is less likely to participate in the labor market (stigma). We also find a positive effect of an increase in an index of white-collar job growth (structure) on married women’s LFP. These effects are present in both rural and urban sectors but are strongest in the rural sector. However, middle and secondary educated women are still found to have substantially lower LFP than low- and graduate-educated women in both sectors. Indeed, over time, the U-shape persists in the rural sector and deepens in the urban sector. Because unobservables are quite large in the urban sector, we use the method of instrumental variables and find an increasing return at middle levels but stagnation at higher levels.

This article explores the income growth and poverty of rural Indian households, 1994–2005. The estimation strategy consists, first, of a convergence analysis to examine whether poor households are catching up in terms of income, which is then followed by a transition analysis to examine whether poor households are more likely to exit poverty than to remain poor—that is, to essentially test for whether poverty traps are escapable. The identification strategy explicitly addresses issues pertaining to the potential endogeneity and measurement error of initial income and poverty. We find evidence of both income convergence and poverty persistence, but with a higher probability of exiting poverty than of the remaining poor. This suggests that poverty traps, though existent, are not entrapping in rural India. The key variables driving these results are education, occupation and asset ownership. Finally, we discuss the policy implications and provide directions for future research in this area. JEL Codes: I32, J15, O15, O18, O47, Z12, Z13

This study provides evidence of the importance of cognitive and noncognitive skills to completion of three types of vocational training (VET): education and health, technical, and business. Math and language exam scores constitute the key measures of cognitive skills; teacher-assigned grades the key measure of noncognitive skills. The data consist of two 9-year panels of youth completing compulsory education in Denmark. Estimation of completion proceeds separately by gender and VET type, controlling for selection and right censoring. The authors find that all skills are inversely related to VET enrollment, even controlling for family-specific effects. Estimates for completion vary considerably by program type, demonstrating the methodological importance of distinguishing among different VET courses. Math scores are positively related to certification for all VET tracks, though with very different magnitudes; language skills are inversely related for the nonbusiness tracks; and noncognitive skills appear important primarily for the business track. This study provides evidence of the importance of cognitive and noncognitive skills to completion of three types of vocational training (VET): education and health, technical, and business. Math and language exam scores constitute the key measures of cognitive skills; teacher-assigned grades the key measure of noncognitive skills. The data consist of two 9-year panels of youth completing compulsory education in Denmark. Estimation of completion proceeds separately by gender and VET type, controlling for selection and right censoring. The authors find that all skills are inversely related to VET enrollment, even controlling for family-specific effects. Estimates for completion vary considerably by program type, demonstrating the methodological importance of distinguishing among different VET courses. Math scores are positively related to certification for all VET tracks, though with very different magnitudes; language skills are inversely related for the nonbusiness tracks; and noncognitive skills appear important primarily for the business track.

In this paper, we use the policy variation of two different types of health insurance in the US and in Denmark - employer-provided and universal insurance combined with substantial differences in expected and actual medical out-of-pocket expenditures - to explore the effect of new severe health shocks on the labor force participation of older workers. Our results not only provide insight into how relative disease risk affects labor force participation at older ages, but also into how different types of health care and health insurance systems affect individual decisions of labor force participation. Although employer-tied health insurance and greater out-of-pocket medical expenditures give US Americans greater incentives to continue to work, we find only small differences in the work response between the two countries. We provide compelling evidence that our somewhat counterintuitive finding is the result of differential mortality and baseline health differences coupled with distinct treatment regimes under the respective health care systems.

Attractive people enjoy many social and economic advantages. Most studies find effects of attractiveness on happiness or life satisfaction, but based on traditional cross-sectional approaches. We use a large longitudinal survey consisting of a sample of male and female high school graduates from Wisconsin followed from their late teens to their mid-1960s. The panel construction of the data and the fact that interviews of the siblings of the respondents are available allow us to analyze the effects of physical appearance on psychological well-being (human flourishing) and ill-being (distress and depression) conditioning on unobserved individual heterogeneity via random effects. We find a significant positive relationship between measures of physical attractiveness (greater facial attractiveness at high school, and lower BMI and greater height in middle age) and a measure of psychological well-being, and a significant negative relationship between measures of physical attractiveness and distress/depression. These effects are slightly smaller when we adjust for demographics and mental ability but, with the exception of height, remain significant. Our results suggest that attractiveness impacts psychological well-being and depression directly as well as through its effects on other life outcomes.

We evaluate the impact of educational reforms starting from the mid-1990s in India on the school attendance rate of low-income rural children aged 6–14 compared to ineligible rural children, employing NSSO data from 1983 to 2004/2005. We estimate a triple difference model allowing for differential (linear) trends and find a positive causal effect of school reforms on the school attendance rate of rural low-income children, although somewhat stronger for girls than boys. For both girls and boys in these groups, the increase in attendance rate is driven by the 6–11 age category and by children of scheduled tribe or scheduled caste background.

Most OECD countries spend substantially more on maternity leave schemes than on early childcare. However, given high tax burdens and rapidly aging populations, female labor force participation is critically needed. Moreover, it is important to know whether the main beneficiaries, the children themselves, reap more benefits from one or the other in the long term. The first cohorts exposed to the introduction or extension of maternity/paternity leave schemes and subsidized childcare programs have now completed education and entered the labor market, allowing an investigation of these programs’ long-term economic effects.

Is success in a task used strategically by individuals to motivate their beliefs prior to taking action in a subsequent, unrelated, task? Also, is the distortion of beliefs reinforced for individuals who have lower status in society? Conducting an artefactual field experiment in India, we show that success when competing in a task increases the performers’ self-confidence and competitiveness in the subsequent task. We also find that such spillovers affect the self-confidence of low-status individuals more than that of high-status individuals. Receiving good news under Affirmative Action, however, boosts confidence across tasks regardless of the caste status.

We investigate the effect of an acute health shock on retirement among elderly male workers in Denmark, 1991-1999, and in particular whether various welfare state programs and institutions impinge on the retirement effect. The results show that an acute health event increases the retirement chances of elderly male workers by 8%, and that this increase in the baseline retirement probability is not affected by eligibility to early exit programs and persists even after accounting for selection due to take-up of disability pension. Neither is it affected by the relatively long duration of sickness benefits in Denmark nor by the promotion of corporate social responsibility initiatives since the mid-1990s. In the late 1990s, however, the retirement rate following a health shock is reduced to 3% with the introduction of the subsidized employment program (fleksjob) but this effect is on the margin of being significant. For the most part, the retirement effect following a health shock seems to be immune to the availability of a multitude of government programs for older workers in Denmark.

The access to health networks is an integral part of sustainable development, which has largely been ignored in previous studies of health knowledge production. Additionally, the previous literature is scarce on health knowledge gaps and the intersection of deeply institutionalized marginalization of certain groups—such as by caste or by religious system in India, Bangladesh, or Nepal—and the resources these groups have available. To address these knowledge gaps, we explore the relationship among health knowledge and caste and religion and a number of important mediating factors in India, estimating causal impacts through a combination of instrumental variables and decomposition methods. Five main results are established: (1) the presence of a substantively large “raw” (unconditional) health knowledge caste gap favoring high caste women—though at the same time with an overall relatively low level of health knowledge across castes and religions—thus pointing towards even deeper, more structural, endemic public policy challenges for Indian policy makers); (2) evidence that the endowments and the returns to these endowments increase the health knowledge gaps—indicating that high caste women have higher education and better access to health networks but also higher returns to these characteristics; (3) for Adivasi women network homophily works to decrease the discrimination part of the health knowledge gap—it may therefore not be enough if these women merely get access to health networks (even if they are of high quality) if caste and religion-related gaps in health knowledge are to be reduced; such networks also have to be homophilous, to have an effect; (4) while observed individual characteristics explain a large—indeed, sometimes the major—part of the gaps, in several cases a substantial part of the health knowledge gap is left unexplained—consistent with the presence of discrimination against these systemically marginalized women; and (5) in turn, the substantial dampening of the caste and religion effect once socioeconomic status is controlled for suggests that caste differentials are not independent of class differentials. We also perform similar analysis for child mortality, now including health knowledge as one of the focal explanatory variables and obtain similar results—thus providing additional evidence that health knowledge and health network access, two major factors of sustainable development, should receive more attention by policymakers in the future. Lastly, policy implications and implications and suggestions for future data collection efforts are also discussed.

We investigate pre-teenage effects of type of non-parental child care at age three (preschool versus more informal family day care) on overall and risky behavior and objective and self-evaluated abilities. We find no strong evidence that one type of non-parental care outperforms the other, although children who have been placed in preschool tend to like school better.

The effect of HRM practices on the within‐firm gender gap in wages in manufacturing is investigated merging a 1999 survey on work practices among Danish firms to matched employer–employee panel data. Self‐managed teams, project organization and job rotation schemes are the most widely introduced practices. Accounting for non‐randomness in adoption, the pay gap is reduced among hourly paid workers but increases among salaried workers. Considering practices individually, wage gains from adoption accrue to males except for salaried workers in firms that adopt project organization and for hourly paid workers in firms that introduce quality control circles.

We investigate the degree of correspondence between parents’ reports on child behavioral and educational outcomes using wave four of a rich Danish longitudinal survey of children (the DALSC). All outcomes are measured at age 11 when the children are expected to be in fifth grade. Once discrepancies are detected, we analyze whether they are driven by noisy evaluations or by systematic bias, focusing on the role of parental characteristics and response heterogeneity. We then explicitly assess the relative importance of the mother’s versus the father’s assessments in explaining child academic performance and diagnosed mental health to investigate whether one parent is systematically a better informant of their child’s outcomes than the other. Our results show that parental psychopathology, measured as maternal distress, is a source of systematic misreporting of child functioning, that the parent–child relationship matters, and that mothers are not necessarily a better informant of child functioning than fathers. This last finding should not only be valid for Denmark but also for many other countries, where the father’s role in childcare has been growing.

We exploit time diary data for couple households in Denmark and the United States to examine the impact alternative measures of intrahousehold bargaining power have upon different measures of individual time use. Power measures have traditionally been based on current earnings, but earnings are determined by past/present time use decisions and hence potentially endogenous. More powerful individuals have been hypothesized to spend less time on housework, however, housework time also depends upon relative preferences for home produced goods and relative productivity in home production. Gendered notions of time use and censored earnings and time data also pose problems. We propose examining leisure time and exploring alternative measures of power less prone to endogeneity bias in order to address these theoretical and empirical concerns. Our results indicate that leisure time is more consistently and significantly associated with `power' than housework time and that education share performs quite well as a measure of power. These results are particularly strong on non-work days and in the United States.

The Nordic countries at the same time exhibit a remarkably high participation rate of mothers and a more moderate decline in fertility rates compared to other Western countries. This has been attributed to the fact that the welfare state model and, especially, the family friendly policies chosen in the Nordic countries are unique. In this paper we evaluate the impact of Nordic countries’ family friendly policies on employment, wages and children’s well-being. We demonstrate that, although the ‘Nordic model’ has been successful in boosting female employment, it is a costly solution. Furthermore, family-friendly policies mainly directed towards giving mothers the right to be on long paid maternal leave have adverse effects on women’s wages with consequences for gender equality. Indeed, extensive family-friendly schemes may even have created a ‘system-based glass ceiling’ hindering women’s career progression. There is no evidence however of a trade-off between family-friendly policies and family welfare as effects on child development and children’s well-being of publicly provided child-care are found to be modest or even positive.

Longevity is increasing and many people are spending a greater proportion of their lives reliant on pensions to support consumption. In response to this, several countries have mandated delays to age of first entitlement to pension benefits in order to reduce incentives to retire early. However, it is unknown to what extent older individuals have the health capacity to sustain the longer working lives that delayed pension benefits may encourage. We estimate the health capacity to work longer in Denmark by comparing how much older individuals work today with how much those with similar mortality rates worked in the past, and how much younger individuals today with similar self-assessed health work. We find substantial health capacity for longer working lives among those currently aged 55 and above. We also find significant heterogeneity by education and gender. Those with a high school degree have the greatest additional work capacity, women have more additional capacity than men, especially women with a college degree.

Hearing loss is one of the most common conditions related to aging, and previous descriptive evidence links it to early exit from the labor market. These studies are usually based on self-reported hearing difficulties, which are potentially endogenous to labor supply. We use unique representative data collected in the spring of 2005 through in-home interviews. The data contains self-reported functional and clinically-measured hearing ability for a representative sample of the Danish population aged 50-64. We estimate the causal effect of hearing loss on early retirement via disability benefits, taking into account the endogeneity of functional hearing. Our identification strategy involves the simultaneous estimation of labor supply, functional hearing, and coping strategies (i.e. accessing assistive devices at work or informing one's employer about the problem). We use hearing aids as an instrument for functional hearing. Our main empirical findings are that endogeneity bias is more severe for men than women and that functional hearing problems significantly increase the likelihood of receiving disability benefits for both men and women. However, relative to the baseline the effect is larger for men (47% vs. 20%, respectively). Availability of assistive devices in the workplace decreases the likelihood of receiving disability benefits, whereas informing an employer about hearing problems increases this likelihood.

We conduct an artefactual field experiment to examine various spillover effects of Affirmative Action policies in the context of castes in India. We test a) if individuals who compete in the presence of Affirmative Action policies remain competitive in the same proportion after the policy has been removed, and b) whether having been exposed to the policy generates unethical behavior and spite against subjects from the category who has benefited from the policy. We find that these policies increase substantially the confidence of the lower caste members and motivate them to choose significantly more frequently a tournament payment scheme. However, we find no spillover effect on confidence and competitiveness once Affirmative Action is withdrawn: any lower caste’s gain in competitiveness due to the policy is then entirely wiped out. Furthermore, the strong existing bias of the dominant caste against the lower caste is not significantly aggravated by Affirmative Action.

This is one of the few studies that estimates the effects of type of childhood care on academic achievement at higher grade levels by linking day care registers and educational registers. We use entire birth cohorts of ethnic Danish children, enrolled in either center based day care or family day care at age 2. Exploiting variation across municipalities in guaranteed access to center based care as an instrument for type of care our results show that center based day care improves grades in Danish language in the final year of compulsory school with around 0.2 standard deviations.

Previous empirical research has been unable to find a sufficient correlationbetween subjective well-being and per capita income, being hampered by limited longitudinal information and an inability to account for the predictions of competing theories. We bring new evidence to this question by exploiting a long and complete time-series from the Eurobarometer Survey, 1973-2002 allowing an examination of trends in life satisfaction across 15 European countries employing a modified version of Kendall's Tau. Our results show that while current GDP growth does not affect trends in well-being, accelerations in GDP growth do. In addition, faster GDP growth and faster growth of government consumption than in neighbouring countries induces positive trends in life satisfaction. Our findings are consistent with the predictions of aspirations theory and the theory of reference group comparisons. Previous empirical research has been unable to find a sufficient correlation between subjective well-being and per capita income, being hampered by limited longitudinal information and an inability to account for the predictions of competing theories. We bring new evidence to this question by exploiting a long and complete time-series from the Eurobarometer Survey, 1973-2002 allowing an examination of trends in life satisfaction across 15 European countries employing a modified version of Kendall's Tau. Our results show that while current GDP growth does not affect trends in well-being, accelerations in GDP growth do. In addition, faster GDP growth and faster growth of government consumption than in neighbouring countries induces positive trends in life satisfaction. Our findings are consistent with the predictions of aspirations theory and the theory of reference group comparisons.

Trends in US and Danish gender wage gaps in the 1980s and 1990s are analysed within the framework of simple auto-regressive time-series models. Results show a saturation effect in the wage progress of women in Denmark at a level of 85% but no similar signs of stabilization in the USA. Also, no evidence is found that business cycle variables can explain the development of the gender wage gap in either country during this time period.

We model fertility as endogenous to the family's economic status because poor households choose to have large families in the absence of adequate social insurance. Because of a strong son preference in India, having two girls first can proxy an exogenous increase in fertility, and is therefore a good instrument for fertility in determining poverty of rural households. The 1993–1994 Indian Quinquennial Survey data shows that even though poverty rates are comparable, 74 per cent of two-girl families have a third child compared to 63 per cent of other families. Fertility significantly positively affects poverty when treated as exogenous, but vanishes once endogenised. These results are robust to omitting states with skewed sex ratios and to proxying economic status by expenditures.

Applying a new decomposition method to U.S. PSID and Danish Longitudinal Sample data, the authors compare how U.S. and Danish gender wage gaps developed between 1983 and 1995. In Denmark, they find, the wage gap widened, because the worsening in women's relative returns to observable human capital attributes, as well as in their ranking relative to men in unobservable productive attributes, more than offset their wage gains from improved observable qualifications relative to men's. In the United States, in contrast, the gender convergence in qualifications offset adverse influences, including increasing wage dispersion throughout the labor market, to result in a narrowing of the gap. The largest increase in the gap in Denmark was experienced by women in the top earnings decile, and the largest decline in the gap in the United States affected those at the top and in the middle of the distribution. (Free full-text download available at http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/.)

We analyse the joint distribution of the durations until retirement of Danish husbands and wives. We estimate a multivariate mixed proportional hazards model that allows for interdependence in the times to retirement of spouses. We find evidence of strong complementarities in leisure times. Symmetrically for husband and wife, low own income and poor health are found to induce individual retirement (prior to spouse's retirement), whereas low spousal income is not, and neither party is found likely to substitute own for purchased care when the spouse is in poor health. Furthermore, high wealth and low income are found to spur joint (simultaneous) retirement. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

There are large differences in labor force participation rates by health status. We examine to what extent these differences are determined by the provisions of Disability Insurance and other pension programs. Using administrative data for Denmark we find that those in worse health and with less schooling are more likely to receive DI. The gradient of DI participation across health quintiles is almost twice as steep as for schooling - moving from having no high school diploma to college completion. Using an option value model that accounts for different pathways to retirement, applied to a period spanning a major pension reform, we find that pension program incentives in general are important determinants of retirement age. Individuals in poor health and with low schooling are significantly more responsive to economic incentives than those who are in better health and with more schooling. Similar gradients in outcomes and behavior by health and schooling partially reflects the less educated having poorer health on average, but also that the less educated have worse job prospects and higher replacement rates due to a progressive formula for DI and other pension benefits.

There are large differences in labor force participation rates by health status. We examine to what extent these differences are determined by the provisions of Disability Insurance and other pension programs. Using administrative data for Denmark we find that those in worse health and with less schooling are more likely to receive DI. The gradient of DI participation across health quintiles is almost twice as steep as for schooling - moving from having no high school diploma to college completion. Using an option value model that accounts for different pathways to retirement, applied to a period spanning a major pension reform, we find that pension program incentives in general are important determinants of retirement age. Individuals in poor health and with low schooling are significantly more responsive to economic incentives than those who are in better health and with more schooling. Similar gradients in outcomes and behavior by health and schooling partially reflects the less educated having poorer health on average, but also that the less educated have worse job prospects and higher replacement rates due to a progressive formula for DI and other pension benefits.

The utilization and reward of the human capital of immigrants in the labor market of the host country has been studied extensively. Using Swedish register data from 2001–2008, we extend the immigrant educational mismatch literature by analyzing incidence, wage effects and state dependence in overeducation among natives and immigrants. In line with previous research we find a higher incidence and a lower return to overeducation among immigrants indicating that immigrants lose more from being overeducated. We find a high degree of state dependence in overeducation both among natives and immigrants, but considerably higher among immigrants. JEL codes J61, I21, J24, J31, F22

I. INTRODUCTION Men and women hold different types of jobs and are employed in different occupations. They also tend to work under different incentive systems, with women being compensated by piece rate payment schemes more frequently. (1) Relatively few women hold top corporate positions, although in many countries women's educational attainment now exceeds men's. (2) Fewer women than men have started up their own business (according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, in 2002 in the United Kingdom, 3.1% of the female population and 6% of the male population contributed to start-up activities; the same year in France, only 26% of start-ups were created by women--SINE survey, INSEE). Women are also less likely to run for elections, and they represent a low percentage of seats in national parliaments (according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, in 2006 they represented 19.7% in the United Kingdom, 18.5% in France, and 16.3% in the United States). In order to explain these gender differences economists have considered supply- and demand-side explanations. Demand-side explanations focus on discrimination (see Altonji and Blank 1999 for a review of these theories, Neumark, Blank, and Van Nort 1996 or Goldin and Rouse 2000 for empirical evidence). Supply-side explanations usually emphasize the role of women in the family and its impact on human capital investment and career choices (Mincer and Polachek 1974; Polachek 1981). A more recent literature analyzes if there are gender differences in competitiveness, investigating both the effect of gender on the productive efficiency of incentives and the effect of gender on the selection of competitive incentives. Gneezy, Niederle, and Rustichini (2003) show that men, in contrast to women, perform better in competitive settings than when paid a piece rate. Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) reveal a different tendency of men and women to choose to be rewarded based on relative performance rather than on the basis of one's own performance only. Women tend to shy away from competition. The reasons behind these intriguing results are still poorly understood and they have inspired many other studies. In particular, they lead us to investigate the sensitiveness of women's competitiveness to the environment. In our laboratory experiment, participants also have to choose between a piece rate and a tournament payment scheme before performing a task. The novelty of our experiment is that we measure, conditional on a person's own gender, the impact of gender matching on the person's competitiveness. Compared to Niederle and Vesterlund (2007), we can measure how beliefs regarding potential competitors' choices influence individuals' decisions. There are several reasons why individuals in competitive situations may perceive other individuals' gender to be relevant. First, they may believe that the ability or payment scheme choices of men and women differ, which can lead them to condition behavior on other individuals' gender. Second, they may use their own and the other participants' gender as a coordination device (see Holm 2000; Knight 2002). Third, some individuals may, regardless of beliefs about underlying fundamentals and gender-based conventions, have preferences that induce them to treat men and women differently. Our experiment, while not designed to cleanly distinguish between these mutually nonexclusive explanations, is designed to analyze in the laboratory whether information on the gender of a potential competitor influences the decision to compete or not. An important experimental design choice was how to provide gender information. (3) We began by employing an indirect procedure: participants were given pseudonyms that corresponded to their gender, and they learned each other's pseudonyms before making decisions, but it was not made common knowledge to participants in the instructions that a pseudonym was male (female) if and only if the person in question was a man (woman). …

This paper explores the dynamics of income and poverty of rural Indian households, 1994-2005. The estimation strategy consists of convergence analysis to test whether poor households are catching-up in terms of income, followed by transition analysis to test whether poor households are more likely to exit poverty than to remain poor. The identification strategy explicitly addresses issues pertaining to the potential endogeneity and measurement error of initial income and poverty. We find evidence of income convergence and a higher probability of exiting poverty than of remaining poor. The key variables driving these results are education, occupation and asset ownership.

Using a search model for Danish labor market entrants, we are one of the first studies to test whether second-generation immigrants have the same job-offer arrival and layoff rates as ethnic Danes have. We contribute to the search literature by incorporating matching as a way to ensure sub-sample homogeneity. Thus, we match second-generation immigrants to their ethnic Danish twins on the basis of parental characteristics and informal network quality. There are big differences before matching, but after matching, second-generation immigrants perform as well or better than their ethnic Dane counterparts do on the labor market, though not with respect to layoffs. This result is mainly driven by the group of high school graduates and those with a primary school education only. Second generation immigrants with vocational education, males in particular, face both significantly lower arrival rates when unemployed and significantly higher layoff rates than those of their ethnic Danish twins.

A number of studies have documented negative long term effects of low birth weight. Yet, not much is known about the dynamics of the process leading to adverse health and educational outcomes in the long run. While previous studies focusing mainly on LBW effects on physical growth and cognitive outcomes have found effects of the same size at both school age and young adulthood, others have found a diminishing negative effect over time. The purpose of this paper was to bring new evidence to this issue by analyzing the medium run effects of low birth weight on child behavioral outcomes as well as physical growth at ages 6 months, 3½, 7½ and 11 years using data from the Danish Longitudinal Survey of Children. Observing the same children at different points in time enabled us to chart the evolution of anthropometric and behavioral deficits among children born with low birth weight and helped understanding the nature and timing of interventions.

This paper investigates by means of a simple specification test whether gender differences in occupational distributions arise from gender differences in preferences or from gender differences in hiring. Results obtained from estimating a bivariate choice model on NLSY data indicate that neither hypothesis can be rejected

We use matched Danish health survey and register data to investigate discrepancies between register-based diagnoses and self-reported morbidity. We hypothesize that false negatives (medical diagnoses existing in the register but not reported in the survey) arise partly because individuals fear career repercussions of being discovered suffering a chronic or severe illness that potentially lowers productivity. We find evidence of substantial underreporting, which is indeed systematically higher for individuals in the labor market.

This paper investigates the interaction between measures of health, disability pension take up and labor market performance in Denmark by charting their development over time and by examining how they are affected by key policy reforms in the area of early retirement. The main emphasis is on the long-run development of the Social Disability Pension (SDP) program, and whether it concurs with trends in population health based on mortality indicators (both overall and cause-specific) and with self-reported health. A strong relationship is found between labor force activity measures and non-health related programs for early retirement for those 60 and older. However, no clear relationship is evident between SDP take up and the health indicators. One reason for the lack of a correlation is most probably that SDP is "on its own track" due to program innovations and reforms creating competing risks or program substitution especially for the 50+ population.

This paper investigates the interaction between measures of health, disability pension take up and labor market performance in Denmark by charting their development over time and by examining how they are affected by key policy reforms in the area of early retirement. The main emphasis is on the long-run development of the Social Disability Pension (SDP) program, and whether it concurs with trends in population health based on mortality indicators (both overall and cause-specific) and with self-reported health. A strong relationship is found between labor force activity measures and non-health related programs for early retirement for those 60 and older. However, no clear relationship is evident between SDP take up and the health indicators. One reason for the lack of a correlation is most probably that SDP is "on its own track" due to program innovations and reforms creating competing risks or program substitution especially for the 50+ population.