Skaksen & Samandari (2022): “Hvordan klarer de ældre sig på arbejdsmarkedet?”
The ROCKWOOL Foundation Working Paper Series No. 61.
About
I am a PhD Student at the Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI), Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, and The ROCKWOOL Foundation. My supervisors are N. Meltem Daysal and Torben Heien Nielsen. During the 2026 Spring Semester, I am visiting Professor Joseph J. Doyle Jr. at MIT Sloan.
My research studies economic inequality and the role of public policy, social insurance, and local opportunity in shaping health, labor-market, and intergenerational outcomes. Using rich administrative data and plausibly exogenous variation, I examine questions such as how access to paid leave affects mental health and household labor supply, and how local opportunity affects the intergenerational mobility of refugees.
Research
Working papers
Work in progress
Randomized to Opportunity: Measuring Place Effects for Refugee Children
Area measures of social mobility are increasingly used to inform place-based policy. This project studies such measures for refugee children who were randomly assigned to municipalities through Denmark's 1986–1998 refugee dispersal policy. We focus on pre-determined measures of economic opportunity available when children arrive and validate them using a mover-exposure design among locals. Using Danish registry data, we find that refugee children assigned to higher-opportunity areas have better long-run outcomes, including in the labor market, criminal justice involvement, foster care placement, teen motherhood, and educational attainment. We also examine whether social mobility is particularly influential relative to other area characteristics and find that area-level inequality is an even stronger predictor of child outcomes. The findings suggest that measures of the areas where children grow up meaningfully predict their long-term well-being.
Benefits for the Bereaved: The Effects of Paid Bereavement Leave
Paid bereavement leave is a policy instrument for social insurance and redistribution. This project estimates the causal effects of paid bereavement leave on health and labor-market outcomes by exploiting a discontinuity in eligibility: both parents are granted 14 weeks of paid leave following a stillbirth, but not following a miscarriage. This design helps isolate the insurance effect from the underlying health shock. Using population-wide administrative data from Denmark for 1995–2018, I examine effects on prescription drug take-up along the extensive and intensive margins, labor-market responses, and heterogeneity across socioeconomic dimensions. I also quantify implications for social welfare and public finances.
Teaching
- Spring 2024: Health Economics, Teaching Assistant for Prof. Torben Heien Nielsen.
- Fall 2018/2019: Investment and Finance, Teaching Assistant for Prof. Bo Jellesmark Thorsen.
- Spring 2018: Applied Game Theory, Teaching Assistant for Prof. Jens Leth Hougaard.
- Spring 2017: Applied Game Theory, Teaching Assistant for Prof. Jens Leth Hougaard.
Contact
Email: nsa@econ.ku.dk
Secondary email: nsa@rff.dk