Search results

Alcohol is considered one of the most serious threats to population health, and to mitigate its negative consequences, most countries have implemented policies such as minimum legal drinking ages (MLDAs). Denmark, a country with an exceptionally liberal youth alcohol culture, introduced a minimum age for purchasing alcoholic beverages as late as in 1998, prohibiting those below 15 to buy alcohol. Previous studies from the U.S. and a few other contexts have provided substantial evidence that MLDA legislations influence outcomes such as car accidents, but there is little evidence from Europe. Moreover, there is limited evidence for injuries other than those due to vehicle accidents. We exploit the introduction and changes in the MLDA in Denmark to estimate effects on all classes of injuries, as well as alcohol-related outcomes such as intoxication and poisoning. We bring comprehensive evidence on the effects of a total of three reforms, which affected alcohol availability along different margins – 1) establishing an off-premise alcohol purchase age of 15 (1998), 2) raising the off-premise alcohol purchase age to 16 (2004), and 3) increasing the purchase age of beverages exceeding 16.5% in alcohol content from 16 to 18 (2011). Our findings show significant impacts of all the three reforms on injuries. We find that girls responded more to two first two reforms influencing alcohol availability, whereas boys responded more to the last reform, influencing availability of strong liquor. On the other hand, no consistent differences were found across different socioeconomic groups, perhaps reflecting similar patterns of drinking.

Our study is one of the first to take search friction and cross-firm differences in factor productivity into account when investigating firm behavior towards second-generation immigrants in Denmark. We ensure sub-sample homogeneity in search models by matching second-generation immigrants to their ethnic Danish twins according to parental characteristics and informal network quality. We find that second-generation immigrants with a high-school or primary school education, in particular females, perform as well or better than their ethnic counterparts. Second generation immigrants with vocational education, in particular males, face lower arrival rates when unemployed and higher layoff rates than those of their twins.

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.

AbstractWe compare the long‐run labour market integration of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) refugees who arrived in the 1990s to the Scandinavian countries in the settings of Sweden and Denmark, respectively. These otherwise similar countries faced different economic conditions at the time of arrival and over the observation period. They also differed in terms of the restrictiveness of asylum policies and in attitudes towards immigration. Using register data from Statistics Sweden and Statistics Denmark, we show that FRY refugees, in both child and adult generations at arrival, are better integrated 12–15 years later in Sweden than in Denmark, even though Sweden experienced a higher level of unemployment than Denmark throughout the period. Our findings suggest that asylum policies promoting early labour market entry and early exposure to a host country's schooling system, as well as access to disability pension and social assistance, are important factors affecting refugee labour market integration.