Update
“Early Career Setbacks and Women’s Career-Family Trade-Off” (updated March 2024) , with Frederik Plesner Lyngse and Itzik Fadlon. Link
Abstract. We study how early career setbacks—in the form of worse initial job matches—have permanent labor and marriage market impacts differentially for males and females. We analyze the Danish physician labor market and exploit a randomized lottery that determines sorting into internships, which differ in the bundle of location and career opportunities they provide. Using administrative data for over fifteen years after the lottery experiment, we find that initial labor market sorting has important long-run effects on occupational choice and career trajectories for women only, which increases the gender earnings gap by 10-15 percent over the decades after graduation from medical school. We show that the differential gender sensitivity to setbacks is driven by women’s career-family trade-off, where women exhibit earlier and higher fertility and subsequently sort into more flexible but lower-paying jobs that facilitate their greater family responsibilities. Our findings have implications for policies aimed at gender equality, as they reveal how persistent gaps can arise even in settings with institutional equality of opportunity and they point to addressing family considerations and job flexibility as key channels.
(Previous version: “Causal Effects of Early Career Sorting on Labor and Marriage Market Choices: A Foundation for Gender Disparities and Norms”, 2022)
Publications
Understanding the Rise in Life-expectancy inequality , with Gordon Dahl, Claus Thustrup Kreiner and Benjamin Ly Serena. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2024, Link, Paper
The causal effect of early retirement on medication use across sex and occupation: evidence from Danish administrative data, with Jolien Cremer and Claus Ekstrøm in The European Journal of Health Economics, 2024, Link
Health behavioral responses to parental myocardial infarction and impact on own risk of disease in the general population, with Christian Skouenborg, Martin Lucas Jørgensen and Marianne Benn, in Frontiers in public health, 2023, Link
Family Labor Supply Responses to Severe Health Shocks: Evidence from Danish Administrative Records, with Itzik Fadlon, in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics; 2020 Link.
Family Health Behaviors, with Itzik Fadlon, in the American Economic Review, 2019 Link. Paper
Childhood Health Shocks, Comparative Advantages, and Long-term Outcomes: Evidence from the last Danish Polio Epidemic, with Miriam Gensowski, Nete Nielsen, Maya Rossin-Slater and Miriam Wüst, in Journal of Health Economics. 2019 Link.
Household Labor Supply and the Gains from Social Insurance, with Itzik Fadlon in Journal of Public Economics, 2019. Link.
Role of income mobility for the measurement of inequality in life expectancy, with Claus Thustrup Kreiner and Benjamin Ly Serena, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2018. Link.
Aktive og passive valg i pensionsopsparingen, in the Danish Journal of Economics, 2017. Link.
Do Employer Contributions Reflect Employee Preferences? Evidence from a Retirement Savings Reform in Denmark, with Itzik Fadlon and Jessica Laird, in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2016. Link.
The Relationship between self-rated health and hospital records, in Health economics, 2016. Link.
Active vs. Passive Decissions and Crowd-Out in Retirment Savings Accounts: Evidence from Denmark, with Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Tore Olsen and Søren Leth-Petersen, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2014. Link.
Ongoing work
The Effects of Physician Prescribing Behavior on Drug Use and Labor Supply: Evidence from Movers in Denmark, with Jessica Laird. Link.
Economic Resources, Mortality and Inequality, with Orazio Attanasio. Link.