Publications

We estimate the effect of a female employee giving birth and taking parental leave on small firms and coworkers in Denmark using a dynamic difference-in-differences design. We find little evidence that parental leave take-up has negative effects on firms and coworkers overall. This is because most firms are very effective in compensating for the worker on leave by hiring temporary workers and by increasing other employees’ hours. In contrast, we do find evidence that parental leave has negative effects on a small subsample of firms which are less able to use their existing employees to compensate for absent workers.

Previous research has documented a correlation in contemporaneously measured time preferences between parents and children. However, this evidence is vulnerable to concerns of reverse causality and the transmission mechanisms remain largely unknown. Based on high-quality administrative and survey data, we address these issues and document a substantial transmission of patience from parents to children that persists as children age. In addition, we study two theoretically important but distinct channels of socialization through which parents can influence children’s traits: parenting values and parental involvement. Our results show that, while parental involvement is not an important channel of the transmission, parenting values are key. Authoritative parents—who are characterized by exhibiting high control and warmth—do not transmit patience to their children, in contrast to authoritarian and permissive parents. Thus, the authoritative parenting style can be seen as an effective tool to counteract the transmission of impatience. The results are robust to comprehensive sets of controls and replicate in an independent sample with richer measures of parental involvement.

Does growing up with a sister rather than a brother affect personality? In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the effects of siblings’ gender on adults’ personality, using data from 85,887 people from 12 large representative surveys covering 9 countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Mexico, China, and Indonesia). We investigated the personality traits risk tolerance, trust, patience, locus of control, and the Big Five. We found no meaningful causal effects of the gender of the next younger sibling, and no associations with the gender of the next older sibling. Based on high statistical power and consistent results in the overall sample and relevant subsamples, our results suggest that siblings’ gender does not systematically affect personality.

Economic research on gender largely focuses on biological sex, the binary classification as either a “man” or “woman.” We investigate the value of incorporating a measure of continuous gender identity (CGI) into economics by exploring whether it explains variation in economic preferences and behavior, beyond the explanatory power of binary sex. First, we validate a novel single-item CGI measure in a survey study, showing that it correlates with measures used in gender research. Second, we use our single-item CGI measure in an incentivized laboratory experiment to assess CGI’s power in explaining previously documented gender gaps in four important economic preferences.

I examine how one central aspect of the family environment --sibling sex composition-- affects women’s gender conformity. Using Danish administrative data, I causally estimate the effect of having a second-born brother relative to a sister for first-born women. I show that women with a brother acquire more traditional gender roles, as measured through their choice of occupation and partner. This results in a stronger response to motherhood in labor market outcomes. As a relevant mechanism, I provide evidence of increased gender-specialized parenting in families with mixed-sex children. Finally, I find persistent effects to the next generation of girls.

This paper investigates how high school gender composition affects students’ participation in STEM college studies. Using Danish administrative data, we exploit idiosyncratic within-school variation in gender composition. We find that having a larger proportion of female peers reduces women’s probability of enrolling in and graduating from STEM programs. Men’s STEM participation increases with more female peers present. In the long run, women exposed to more female peers earn less because they (1) are less likely to work in STEM occupations, and (2) have more children. Our findings show that the school peer environment has lasting effects on occupational sorting and the gender wage gap.

We examine the differential effects of family disadvantage on the education and adult labor market outcomes of men and women using high-quality administrative data on the entire population of Denmark born between 1966 and 1995. We link parental education and family structure during childhood to male-female and brother-sister differences in adolescent outcomes, educational attainment, and adult earnings and employment. Our results are consistent with U.S. findings that boys benefit more from an advantageous family environment than do girls in terms of grade-school outcomes. Father's education, which has not been examined in previous studies, is particularly important for sons. However, we find a very different pattern of parental influence on adult outcomes. Gender gaps in educational attainment, employment, and earnings are increasing in maternal education, benefiting daughters. Paternal education decreases the gender gaps in educational attainment (favoring sons) and labor market outcomes (favoring daughters). We conclude that differences in the behavior of school-aged boys and girls are poor proxies for differences in skills that drive longer-term outcomes.

We study birth order differences in health from birth throughout childhood using matched administrative data for more than one million children born in Denmark between 1981 and 2010. Using family fixed effects models, we find a positive and robust effect of birth order on health at birth; firstborn children are less healthy at birth. Examining prenatal investments, we find that during earlier pregnancies women are more likely to smoke, receive more prenatal care, and are diagnosed with more medical pregnancy complications, suggesting worse maternal health. Data on hospital admissions reveal that the general health advantage of later-born children persists in the first years of life and disappears by age seven. At the same time, later-born children are at each age throughout childhood more likely to be diagnosed with an injury, a result that is in line with previous evidence of a later-born disadvantage in education.