Trond Beldo Klausen

Earnings among young and mature Danish university graduates

This paper studies the association between graduation age and earnings among university graduates in Denmark, which is a country with one of the oldest student populations in the world. Exploiting a rich data-set from administrative registers, the current study is able to track labour market career for a longer period of time and to control for more labour market-relevant variables than any previous study of graduation age and earnings. The results show that graduation age has either a slightly positive or an insignificant impact on starting wages within the public sector or a negative impact on starting wages among private sector employees. This applies to both genders, but the differences are stronger among male employees. The analyses of long-term wages reveal a more homogeneous pattern. Mature graduates earn less in all the years investigated. The wage differences are greatest among male graduates employed in private enterprises, and the gap increases throughout their careers.

Physical Activity and School Performance: Evidence from a Danish Randomised School-Intervention Study

ABSTRACT It has been claimed that physical activity has a positive effect on not only health but also on school performance. Using data from a randomised school-intervention study, this paper investigates whether different interventions promoting physical activity affect school performance in primary school children. The results indicate that on average, the interventions have a very limited beneficial impact on the pupils’ performance. The effects are mostly insignificant, and in some cases even negative. These results are relevant when considering how general school resources and resources targeted towards physical activity in particular should be invested to improve school performance.

Social Origin and Graduation Age: A Cohort Comparison of Danish University Students

This paper investigates whether social origin has an impact on graduation age among university students. A large number of social background factors are applied on a large data set of 4 successive cohorts of Danish university graduates born 1960–1975. These are cohorts for whom university attendance increased steeply. Contrary to recent findings on educational attainment in Scandinavia, the analyses show that the economic capital of the family of origin plays a somewhat greater role than does the cultural capital of the family of origin for getting their offspring through higher education on schedule. The impact of cultural capital decreases across cohorts, but the impact of economic capital is fairly constant.