Childhood poverty increases the likelihood of adult poverty. However, past research offers conflicting accounts of cross-national variation in the strength of-and mechanisms underpinning-the intergenerational persistence of poverty. Here the authors investigate differences in intergenerational poverty in the United States, Australia, Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom using administrative- and survey-based panel datasets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To study educational gradients in births after medically assisted reproduction across 5 countries with different institutional arrangements.
Design: We use logistic regression and compute predicted probabilities to estimate the association between education and giving birth after assisted reproduction, before and after adjustment for maternal age at delivery and marital/partnership status, using an overall sample of about 3.9 million live births in 5 countries.
Previous research identifies stark socioeconomic disparities in child injuries, yet research on the repercussions hereof on other aspects of children's lives remains sparse. This paper tests whether social gradients in minor traumatic brain injuries (mTBIs or concussions) contribute to corresponding inequalities in children's academic performance. Previous research on this topic is mostly based on small samples and confounded by non-random selection into experiencing mTBIs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Previous research has indicated that children conceived through medically assisted reproduction (MAR) generally have cognitive outcomes comparable to or better than naturally conceived children. However, previous studies have been limited in their ability to examine this relationship at a population level and consider variations across different types of MAR.
Methods: This study utilizes data from all live births in Denmark between 2006 and 2009 (n = 259 608), including a subset of births resulting from MAR conceptions (n = 13 566).
While a range of sociodemographic characteristics are associated with a greater risk of peer rejection at school, it is currently unclear how key theoretical frameworks explaining rejection apply to such characteristics. This study examines how migration background, gender, household income, parental education and cognitive ability are linked to peer rejection. Building on person-group dissimilarity and social identity theory, the study assesses the moderating role of classroom composition and the extent to which students reject classmates who differ to themselves (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Global estimates suggest strained mental health during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the lack of nationally representative and longitudinal data with clinically validated measures limits knowledge longer into the pandemic.
Methods: Data from 10 rounds of nationally representative surveys from Denmark tracked trends in risk of stress/depression from just before the first lockdown and through to April 2022. We focused on age groups and men and women in different living arrangements and controlled for seasonality in mental health that could otherwise be spuriously related to pandemic intensity.
With historically similar patterns of high and stable cohort fertility and high levels of gender equality, the Nordic countries of Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland are seen as forerunners in demographic behavior. Furthermore, Nordic fertility trends have strongly influenced fertility theories. However, the period fertility decline that started around 2010 in many countries with relatively high fertility is particularly pronounced in the Nordic countries, raising the question of whether Nordic cohort fertility will also decline and deviate from its historically stable pattern.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Existing estimates of the impact of the COVID-19 burden on mental wellbeing come from countries with high mortality rates. This study therefore aimed to investigate the impact of the first COVID-19 lockdown (March-April 2020) on risk for stress/depression and functional impairment in a representative sample of adult individuals in Denmark, which had lower infection rates, and whether the impact of lockdown was heterogeneous across living situation.
Methods: Using a representative, randomly drawn sample from the complete Danish adult population interviewed in March 2 to April 13, 2020 (n = 2836) and again in July 2020 (n = 1526, 54% retention rate), we study how the imposed lockdown announced March 11 following the onset of the first Danish wave of COVID-19 infections affected mental wellbeing.
Most OECD countries have downsized treatment capacity at psychiatric hospitals substantially. We investigate consequences of these reductions by studying how the decision whether to admit individuals in mental distress to a psychiatric hospital affects their subsequent crime, treatment trajectories, and labor market outcomes. To circumvent nonrandom selection into admission, we use a proxy of occupancy rates prior to a patient's first contact with a psychiatric hospital as an instrument.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Concussions are the most frequent traumatic brain injuries. Yet, the socioeconomic impact of concussions remains unclear. Socioeconomic effects of concussions on working-age adults were studied on a population scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAttention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is negatively associated with a range of academic achievement measures. We use Danish administrative register data to study the impact of medical treatment of ADHD on children's academic performance assessed by student grade point average (GPA). Using administrative register data on children, who begin medical treatment, we conduct a natural experiment and exploit plausible exogenous variation in medical nonresponse to estimate the effect of medical treatment on school-leaving GPA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSystematic comparisons of fertility developments based on education, gender and country context are rare. Using harmonized register data, we compare cohort total fertility and ultimate childlessness by gender and educational attainment for cohorts born beginning in 1940 in four Nordic countries. Cohort fertility (CTF) initially declined in all four countries, although for cohorts born in the 1950s and later, the CTF remained stable or declined only modestly.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Policy Anal Manage
July 2016
Crime and subsequent imprisonment reduces men's chances on the marriage market and increases their divorce risk, but existing research, with a few notable exceptions, is silent about the underlying mechanisms driving these effects. This article studies the effect of home confinement under electronic monitoring as a noncustodial alternative to imprisonment on the risk of relationship dissolution and being single, thereby distinguishing between effects of incarceration and of committing crime. We study a policy that expanded the use of electronic monitoring to address nonrandom selection into electronic monitoring instead of in prison.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMarriage is a risky undertaking that people enter with incomplete information about their partner and their future life circumstances. A large literature has shown how new information gained from unforeseen but long-lasting or permanent changes in life circumstances may trigger a divorce. We extend this literature by considering how information gained from a temporary change in life circumstances-in our case, a couple having a child with infantile colic-may affect divorce behavior.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSince the early 2000s, foster care caseloads have decreased in many wealthy democracies, yet the causes of these declines remain, for the most part, a mystery. This article uses administrative data on all Danish municipalities (N = 277) and a 10% randomly drawn sample of all Danish children (N = 157,938) in the period from 1998 to 2010 to show that increasing medical treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) accounts for a substantial share of the decrease in foster care caseloads. According to our estimates, the decline in foster care caseloads during this period would have been 45% smaller absent increases in medical treatment of ADHD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChild Abuse Negl
October 2015
Compared with other types of out-of-home care, kinship care is cheap, and offers the child a more familiar environment. However, little is known about the causal effect of kinship care on important outcomes. This study is the first to estimate causal effects of kinship care on placement stability, using full-sample administrative data (N=13,157) and instrumental variables methods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough recent research suggests that the cumulative risk of foster care placement is far higher for American children than originally suspected, little is known about the cumulative risk of foster care placement in other countries, which makes it difficult to gauge the degree to which factor foster care placement is salient in other contexts. In this article, we provide companion estimates to those provided in recent work on the US by using Danish registry data and synthetic cohort life tables to show how high and unequally distributed the cumulative risk of foster care placement is for Danish children. Results suggest that at the beginning of the study period (in 1998) the cumulative risk of foster care placement for Danish children was roughly in line with the risk for American children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFoster care children who experience placement disruption and foster care instability are at elevated risk for a host of poor outcomes, yet little work considers what these unstable foster care careers look like or what causes them. In this article, I start by using previous studies on foster care drift, instability, and placement disruptions to define the unstable foster care career as a subset of foster care careers. I then use administrative data on 30,239 Danish children born 1982-1987 who entered foster care to generate nine foster care careers, two of which meet the criteria for an unstable career.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals who spent time in foster care as children fare on average worse than non-placed peers in early adult life. Recent research on the effect of foster care placement on early adult life outcomes provides mixed evidence. Some studies suggest negative effects of foster care placement on early adult outcomes, others find null effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF