Abstract: Crimes against the person impose significant costs on both society and the victims involved. However, our understanding of the factors influencing the decision to commit these crimes remains limited. This poses a challenge to developing effective preventive measures. I show that the propensity to commit crimes against the person increases by 64% and 96% for male and female welfare benefit recipients on the day following cash transfers, relative to 13 days before the payment. My findings also show that larger cash transfers increase the size of this response. I propose that this response may be due to the recipients' increased consumption of alcohol and drugs following cash transfers, which in turn raises their likelihood of displaying aggressive behavior.

Abstract: I investigate the effect of inmates exiting prison and re-entering the criminal market on the criminal activity of their crime partners. I use unique administrative data, which allows me to identify criminal partners as individuals who have been convicted for crimes committed together in the past. My identification strategy exploits that those individuals who experience the release of a crime partner from prison at different times would have been likely to follow the same crime trajectory, had they not experienced such a release. I show that the release of inmates from prison leads to an immediate increase in the crime rates of their criminal partners, which lasts for at least 12 months following release. 

Abstract: Using registry data from Denmark, we track the educational and professional choices of one million individuals from adolescence to adulthood and investigate the effects of early exposure to entrepreneurs on the gender gap and the allocation of talent in entrepreneurship. We exploit within-school, across-cohort variation in adolescents' exposure to entrepreneurship, as measured by the share of their peers whose parents are entrepreneurs during the last years of compulsory schooling. We find that higher exposure to entrepreneurs during adolescence narrows gender gaps in entrepreneurship by encouraging girls’ entry and tenure into this profession. The effect is driven by exposure to the parents of female peers and works via a decrease in girls’ likelihood to discontinue education at the end of compulsory schooling and to hold low-paying jobs as adults. The firms created by women are larger and survive longer than the average firm, indicating that a pool of innately talented entrepreneurs are not pursuing their comparative advantage due to gender-specific entry barriers. Our results suggest that such barriers are both cultural and informational in nature and that raising women's early exposure to entrepreneurship from the 25th to the 75th percentile would increase the total number of jobs created by entrepreneurs by 5.3%.

Abstract: We analyze who falls victim of crime, the immediate and long term consequences of victimization for victims and their families and the heterogeneity in these effects using rare administrative data on the population of reported victims in Denmark. We show that victims are likely to grow up in disadvantaged environments and to be low SES themselves. Furthermore, we show that victimization has long-lasting negative effects on the labor market outcomes of victims, and that these effects are far larger and far more persistent for female relative to male victims.

Abstract: Using an identification strategy based on random assignment of refugees to different municipalities in Denmark between 1986 and 1998, we find strong evidence that gang crime rates in the neighbourhood at assignment increase the probability of boys to commit crimes before the age of 19, and that gang crime (but not other crime) increases the likelihood of teenage motherhood for girls. Higher levels of gang crime also have detrimental and longlasting effects, with men experiencing significantly higher levels of inactivity and women lower earnings and higher levels of welfare benefit claims at ages 19 to 28.

Abstract: The loss of a child is one of the most devastating shocks a parent can experience. We provide the first estimates of the direct effect of youth suicide on parental labour earnings. We use mortality data in the New Zealand Integrated Data Infrastructure to identify youth who died from self-harm, and birth records to identify affected parents and their wage and salary information. We graph the parental earnings profiles before and after the suicide event and construct counterfactual earnings profiles for the affected parents using a comparison group of parents hit by the same shock in the future. Our results show that labour earnings for affected households drop by approximately 6.5% compared to their counterfactual earnings following the child loss and that the earnings drop persists for at least two years following the suicide.