Research

Working with business partners in distant countries often requires operating outside standardworking hours, potentially harming workers' mental well-being—especially for women balanc-ing professional and family responsibilities. This hypothesis is investigated using matchedemployer-employee data from Denmark merged with information on workers' use of prescrip-tion antidepressants (AD) and firms' import and export transactions. The analysis exploitsvariation within job spells and controls for both unobservable firm-year heterogeneity and forthe average differential in annual AD use among men and women. The results indicate thata decline in the business hour overlap between a Danish firm and its foreign trading partnersleads to an increased AD use among women relative to men. This effect is economicallymeaningful, largest for college-educated workers under 45 and more pronounced for singlemothers. In addition to the gender effect, workers in occupations requiring establishingrelationships with others are more strongly affected than those in other occupations.

Misperceptions about the relative wages offered in different jobs may distort job search, especially among young workers entering the labor market. We study this using a survey of early-career job seekers in Denmark linked to administrative data. The survey i) elicits job seekers’ beliefs about typical wages in three jobs that are relevant to them, ii) contains a randomized information treatment revealing actual typical wages, and iii) elicits job seekers’ beliefs about their own potential wages in each job and their planned search behavior. Comparing beliefs about typical wages to administrative data reveals large relative misperceptions. In 80% of cases, the perceived wage gap between two jobs differs from the truth by more than 50%. In two-thirds of cases, job seekers underestimate the true gap, meaning they perceive lower-paying jobs to be overly attractive. Leveraging the information treatment, we show that these misperceptions causally affect search. Receiving information about actual typical wages causes job seekers to update beliefs about their own potential wages, which in turn changes their planned applications: a 1% increase in the perceived wage of one job over another increases the relative likelihood of applying for that job by 4.2%. This affects actual post-survey wages measured in administrative data: since misperceptions mostly inflate the attractiveness of lowerpaying jobs, the information treatment shifts most job seekers to ultimately obtain higher-paying jobs. In a simple discrete choice framework, we estimate that removing relative wage misperceptions would reallocate 9.0% of workers to different jobs and increase wages by 1.2%.

How does job flexibility affect hours worked for workers and their partners, and what are the broader effects on family wellbeing and fertility? We apply BERTopic modeling to the full text of 2 million Danish job advertisements (2012–2024) from jobnet.dk, extracting approximately 300 job characteristics from 40 million sentences. Linking these text-based measures to administrative data on employment, wages, and family outcomes, we exploit within-firm variation driven by M&A events and CEO transitions to estimate the causal effects of family-friendly working conditions on labour supply, fertility, and job separations — including spillovers to partners.