University of the Balearic Islands (UIB): Centralized daycare admissions seminar

October 11, 2024
Majorca, Spain

For several decades, the city of Copenhagen has been using a simple centralized daycare assignment mechanism, offering parents the freedom to choose from over 300 public daycare centers across the city. The purpose of this study is to identify and document some of the key challenges associated with the Copenhagen daycare assignment system, utilizing survey evidence, administrative data from the daycare authority, and register data. Understanding how the Copenhagen system tackles these significant challenges will provide valuable insights for enhancing daycare assignment mechanisms on a broader scale. By studying and addressing these issues, we can work towards creating more efficient and effective daycare assignment processes for parents and children in various settings.

VIVE: Effects of school admission systems on social mobility and place

September 5, 2024
Middlefart, Denmark

Project: School admissions and social mobility

This was an internal plenary talk at VIVE. Thanks for all the feedback and encouragement for my research on the effects of school admission systems on social mobility and place

VIVE: Copenhagen daycare survey seminar

November 8, 2023
Copenhagen, Denmark

Project: Copenhagen daycare survey

I talk about the progress we are making with the Copenhagen daycare survey.

For several decades, the city of Copenhagen has been using a simple centralized daycare assignment mechanism, offering parents the freedom to choose from over 300 public daycare centers across the city. The purpose of this study is to identify and document some of the key challenges associated with the Copenhagen daycare assignment system, utilizing survey evidence, administrative data from the daycare authority, and register data. Understanding how the Copenhagen system tackles these significant challenges will provide valuable insights for enhancing daycare assignment mechanisms on a broader scale. By studying and addressing these issues, we can work towards creating more efficient and effective daycare assignment processes for parents and children in various settings.

This survey is funded by my current DFF grant that runs until the end of 2024. 

Dale T. Mortensen conference

November 2-4, 2023
Sandbjerg Manor, Denmark

Project: Job quality in Denmark

I talk about the progress we are making with the estimating job quality in Denmark.

We address two important issues that matter for policy. One issue is that wages do not measure job quality and that some employees will instead have strong preferences for specific job qualities - what we call amenities. A second issue is that we rarely have direct measures of individual worker productivity. Without these estimates, it is difficult to assess the success of labor and industrial policies. To address these fundamental issues, we propose a simple method (which relies on simple theory and some assumptions on unobservables) to construct estimates of both employee valuations of job quality and employer valuations of employee quality from matched employer-employee data. We apply this methodology to the market for Danish CEOs.

Aarhus University: Labor/family seminar

October 7 2023 @ 1-2:30pm
Aarhus, Denmark

Project: Copenhagen daycare survey

I talk about the progress we are making with the Copenhagen daycare survey.

For several decades, the city of Copenhagen has been using a simple centralized daycare assignment mechanism, offering parents the freedom to choose from over 300 public daycare centers across the city. The purpose of this study is to identify and document some of the key challenges associated with the Copenhagen daycare assignment system, utilizing survey evidence, administrative data from the daycare authority, and register data. Understanding how the Copenhagen system tackles these significant challenges will provide valuable insights for enhancing daycare assignment mechanisms on a broader scale. By studying and addressing these issues, we can work towards creating more efficient and effective daycare assignment processes for parents and children in various settings.

This survey is funded by my current DFF grant that runs until the end of 2024. 

Aarhus University: Macroeconomics seminar

September 13 2023 @ 1-2:30pm
Aarhus, Denmark

Project: Job quality in Denmark

My talk at Aarhus University is about how to infer worker welfare and productivity in different jobs.

We address two important issues that matter for policy. One issue is that wages do not measure job quality and that some employees will instead have strong preferences for specific job qualities - what we call amenities. A second issue is that we rarely have direct measures of individual worker productivity. Without these estimates, it is difficult to assess the success of labor and industrial policies. To address these fundamental issues, we propose a simple method (which relies on simple theory and some assumptions on unobservables) to construct estimates of both employee valuations of job quality and employer valuations of employee quality from matched employer-employee data. We apply this methodology to the market for Danish CEOs.

University of Tokyo Market Design Seminar Series

June 16, 2023 @ 1-2:30pm
Tokyo, Japan

Project: The Copenhagen daycare assignment

The Copenhagen survey of parents with newborn children started in 2022 and is continuing. The early driving motivation for this survey was to better understand how parents interact with the rules of daycare assignment in Copenhagen. However, this survey of all Copenhagen parents with newborn children has also been designed to gather information about these parents and about many of their important decisions related to having a new child – for example, the allocation of parental leaves from work. The survey is also intended to be a basis for panel studies of these parents going forward. The goals of the current presentation are to provide information about the rules of daycare assignment in Denmark and other relevant institutional issues and reforms related to the general parenting decisions of parents with newborn children. This presentation contains information about the questions in the survey as well as the summary data on respondent answers. However, since we are presently merging this data with detailed matched register data on Statistics Denmark servers, the presentation does not contain micro-econometric estimates from the survey data – due to gdpr concerns. Nevertheless, the intended micro-econometric tools in relation to this new data and institutional context will be discussed.

University of Copenhagen Centre for Computational Economics (CCE)

May 17, 2023 @ 8pm
Copenhagen

Project: Job quality in Denmark

Presentation about measurement of job quality and employee welfare.

Western University Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP)

May 4 @ 5pm
London, Ontario

Project: Job quality in Denmark

Presentation about measurement of job quality and employee welfare.

Finnish Center of Excellence in Tax System Research (FIT)

March 2023 @ 1-2:30pm
Tampere. Finland

Project: The Copenhagen daycare assignment

This talk is similar to my talk at the University of Tokyo Market Design Center.