Thomas H. Jørgensen

The legal regime governing the rights and responsibilities of separated parents for shared children has been transformed since the 1980s. Joint custody is now authorized in many countries and is often the default arrangement for raising a child following separation. Unlike monetary transfers, time transfers between separated parents can be very costly when individuals live apart. In this paper, we study the impact of joint custody on interstate geographic mobility. We first show that the migration rate of separated fathers  across state lines has fallen significantly more than that of married fathers since the 1980s. We use two strategies to assess whether joint custody has an  effect on the mobility of separated parents. First, we elicit beliefs about the likelihood of an interstate move under different counterfactual custody regimes in a bespoke survey of separated parents. Second, we use the staggered adoption of joint custody laws across US states to analyze their impact on actual migration outcomes of separated parents. We find that joint custody arrangements reduce the interstate migration of separated fathers by 11 percentage points but has no significant impact on the mobility of mothers. This impact is greatest for college educated fathers. We find suggestive evidence that joint custody is beneficial for the labor market outcomes of separated mothers.

Using four decades of individual linked administrative data from Denmark, we provide the first estimates of intergenerational transmission of victimization, focusing on violent crime. We find that, if a parent was victimized then the chances that a son is victimized double and the chances that a daughter is victimized treble. These associations hold for fathers and mothers and are stronger when the mother is victim. Introducing controls for cohort and neighbourhood fixed effects, parent’s socioeconomic status, parental cohabitation and whether the parent was a crime perpetrator explains about 60% of intergenerational transmission. The intergenerational link is significantly attenuated among families with above-median income, particularly for daughters.

LIFE will develop further the next generation of economic models, focusing on dynamic bargaining of individuals in couples in a dynamic environment. Using empirical data on savings, labor market work, childcare usage, time allocation and marriages and divorces, we will validate the appropriateness of our proposed economic laboratory. Using our framework, LIFE will investigate how not yet implemented tax and transfer policies is likely to affect the economic activity and inequality within families. 

We study how fertility decisions interact with labor supply of men and women. First, we use longitudinal Danish register data and tax reforms to show that increases in wages of women decrease fertility while increases in wages of men increase fertility. Second, we estimate a life-cycle model to quantify the importance of fertility adjustments for labor supply and long-run gender inequality. Wage elasticities of women are more than 10\% lower if fertility cannot be adjusted in our model. Finally, we show that human capital depreciation around childbirth is an important driver of the long-run gender wage gap. 

We examine whether financial incentives affect fertility and family planning. We use a reform reducing child benefits paid to larger families together with Danish longitudinal register data on the universe of legal abortions and birth control pill purchases to address this question. We find that partnered women in low-income households reduced their fertility in response to the reform, partly by increasing the use of abortions. Younger women also increased the use of oral contraceptives. Responses are largest for younger and cohabiting women compared to their married counterparts.  Our results show that family policies can affect family planning through financial incentives. 

We generalize the canonical permanent-transitory income process to allow for infrequent shocks. The distribution of income growth rates can then have a discrete mass point at zero and fat tails as observed in income data. We provide analytical formulas for the unconditional and conditional distributions of income growth rates and higher-order moments. We prove a set of identification results and numerically validate that we can simultaneously identify the frequency, variance, and persistence of income shocks. We estimate the income process on monthly panel data of 400,000 Danish males observed over 8 years. When allowing shocks to be infrequent, the proposed income process can closely match the central features of both monthly and annual income data.

While dynamic bargaining models are growing in popularity, the rich model environments come with a computational burden. We address these difficulties by proposing the interpolated endogenous grid method (iEGM) -- an alternative implementation of the standard EGM -- that approximates the inverse marginal utility function through interpolation. We showcase the performance of our method relative to standard approaches through an example of dynamic consumption allocation in which household members bargain with limited commitment. The iEGM is around 15 times faster than the standard EGM and 50 times faster than traditional value function iterations (VFI), without loss of accuracy. We also provide several computational strategies, including a fast bargaining algorithm, to further reduce solution time. All code used to generate the results are available through our web pages.