Lars Skipper

Seasonality in Economic Models

Seasonality has been a major research area in economics for several decades. The paper asses the recent development in the literature on the treatment of seasonality in economics, and divides it into three interrelated groups. The first group, the Pure Noise Model, consists of methods based on the view that seasonality is noise contaminating the data or more correctly contaminating the information of interest for the economists. The second group, the Time Series Models, treats seasonality as a more integrated part of the modeling strategy, with the choice of model being data driven. The third group, Economic Models of Seasonality, introduces economic theory, i.e. optimizing behavior into the modeling of seasonality.

Program participation, labor force dynamics, and accepted wage rates

We apply a recently suggested econometric approach to measure the effects of active labor market programs on employment, unemployment, and wage histories among participants. We find that participation in most of these training programs produces an initial locking-in effect and for some even a lower transition rate from unemployment to employment upon completion. Most programs, therefore, increase the expected duration of unemployment spells. However, we find that the training undertaken while unemployed successfully increases the expected duration of subsequent spells of employment for many subpopulations. These longer spells of employment come at a cost of lower accepted hourly wage rates.

An empirical assessment of the effects of parenthood on wages

In this chapter, we characterise the selection into parenthood for men and women separately and estimate the effects of motherhood and fatherhood on wages. We apply propensity score matching exploiting an extensive high-quality register-based data set augmented with family background information. We estimate the net effects of parenthood and find that mothers receive 7.4% lower average wages compared to non-mothers, whereas fathers gain 6.0% in terms of average wages from fatherhood.

The Family Gap Reconsidered: What Wombmates Reveal

We shed new light on the effects of having children on hourly wages by exploiting access to data on the entire population of employed twins in Denmark. In addition we use administrative data on absenteeism; the amount of hours off due to holidays and sickness. Our results suggest that childbearing reduces female hourly wages but the principal explanation is in fact mothers’ higher levels of absence. We find a positive wage premium for fathers both when applying OLS on the entire population of Danes and when imposing twin fixed effects in the twin sample.