Job-search Incentives From Labour Market Programs - an Empirical Analysis

In this paper we examine whether the prospect of compulsory programme participation motivates individuals to leave the unemployment insurance (UI) system prior to participation. We analyze data from the Danish labour market. Here a series of reforms have enforced program participation and gradually restricted the duration of unemployment before individuals must enroll into programmes. However, there is substantial heterogeneity in enrollment probabilities. If individuals want to avoid participation and observe the heterogeneity in participation, this will also affect their search behaviour. We estimate a model for anticipatory effects of participation, allowing for heterogeneity, on search behaviour and find large significant effects from anticipation of enrollment on the exit probability out of unemployment.active labour market measures; hazard rates; unobserved heterogeneity

The Effect of Workfare Policy on Crime

In this paper, we focus on a novel and potentially important aspect of the workfare policy in the Danish labor market, namely its effect on crime. We do this by exploiting two policy changes. First, we examine the effect of a series of national welfare reforms introduced during the 1990s. Those reforms strengthened the work requirement for the young welfare recipients and were introduced gradually, starting with younger welfare participants first. We exploit the differential introduction of workfare reform across different age groups as the exogenous variation. Second, we use a unique policy experiment that began in 1987 by an innovative mayor of the Danish city of Farum, where he imposed a 100 % work or training requirement for all welfare recipients immediately from the date of enrollment. By comparing the changes in crime rates among the welfare recipients in Farum before and after 1987 with that of the rest of Denmark, we identify the effect of workfare on the crime rate. Our results show a dramatic decline in the arrest rate among welfare recipients after the introduction of the stronger workfare requirements, both at the national level and in Farum. Those results imply a strong and significant crime reducing effect of the workfare policy.Workfare, Crime, Welfare

Assessing Pandemic-Related Risks and Resilience of Danish Workforce: A Methodological Approach

The restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic brought repercussions for the employees. Most of the workplaces had to temporarily lockdown as a preventive measure to the virus spread. Those individuals who were able to continue working remotely faced a lower risk of job loss compared to those persons who could not. The main question, however, revolves around assessing risks and identifying resilient workers during these restrictive phases of the pandemic. In this article, we propose a new Work-From-Home (WFH) index designed to assess individuals' likelihood of working from home. Utilizing quarterly Labour Force Survey data on the actual extent of remote work among Danish workers from 2008 to 2021, this new index can be employed in any dataset with access to the International Standard Classification of Occupation codes. A comparative analysis is conducted with the commonly applied indexes – the Home Office Index (HOI) and Lockdown Index (LDI) suggested by Faber et al. (2020) and Dingel and Neiman (2020). Our findings reveal that the WFH index offers greater variations by occupations, accounting for diverse outcomes of remote work across different economic sectors. Using Pooled OLS models, the study examines factors influencing resilience and lockdown risks, considering demographics, socioeconomic status, residential location, and industry-related aspects. The results highlight the WFH index's accuracy in measuring remote work possibilities, providing a better-fitted model than in the case of HOI. The findings indicate that notably, male workers in middle to top-level positions, particularly in publicly-owned workplaces, exhibit positive outcomes in remote working and lower lockdown risks. This article not only contributes to future research on labour force resilience but also provides supplementary material for easy application to study labour market changes even in cases with limited data in other countries