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Child maltreatment is a widespread problem with significant costs for both victims and society. In this retrospective cohort study, we develop predictive risk models using Danish administrative data to predict removal decisions among referred children and assess the effectiveness of caseworkers in identifying children at risk of maltreatment. The study analyzes 195,639 referrals involving 102,309 children Danish Child Protection Services received from April 2016 to December 2017. We implement four machine learning models of increasing complexity, incorporating extensive background information on each child and their family. Our best-performing model exhibits robust predictive power, with an AUC-ROC score exceeding 87%, indicating its ability to consistently rank referred children based on their likelihood of being removed. Additionally, we find strong positive correlations between the model’s predictions and various adverse child outcomes, such as crime, physical and mental health issues, and school absenteeism. Furthermore, we demonstrate that predictive risk models can enhance caseworkers’ decision-making processes by reducing classification errors and identifying at-risk children at an earlier stage, enabling timely interventions and potentially improving outcomes for vulnerable children.

We analyse the effect of substituting a weekly mathematics lesson in primary school grades 1-3 with a lesson in mathematics based on chess instruction. We use data from the City of Aarhus in Denmark, combining test score data with a comprehensive data set obtained from administrative registers. We use two different methodological approaches to identify and estimate treatment effects and we tend to find positive effects, indicating that knowledge acquired through chess play can be transferred to the domain of mathematics. We also find larger impacts for unhappy children and children who are bored in school, perhaps because chess instruction facilitates learning by providing an alternative approach to mathematics for these children. The results are encouraging and suggest that chess may be an important and effective tool for improving mathematical capacity in young students.

We evaluate a bridging intervention for a group of young people aged 18-29, with no formal educational qualifications, who are not in employment, education or training. The bridging intervention consisted of classroom training, educational internships and mentoring. Based on Danish register data with a large number of control variables, a propensity score matching estimator was applied to assess the effectiveness of the bridging intervention. The results show that the bridging intervention was effective in increasing educational enrollment and completion for all participants. The effects of the intervention were particularly large for participants assessed to be 'not ready for education' and those diagnosed with psychiatric disorders suggesting that the bridging intervention may be especially beneficial for these subgroups.

In an era characterized by population aging and economic challenges in welfare states across the world, sustaining these welfare systems requires a large workforce. Many long-term unemployed individuals, receiving social assistance and only marginally attached to the labor market, aspire to work but encounter a labyrinth of obstacles. While various activation programs are available to unemployed individuals, their effectiveness in helping those who have been out of work for an extended period remains uncertain. Integrating these social assistance recipients into the labor market thus remains an unsolved challenge due to various disadvantages, including health-related, social, family, housing, and personal challenges that make it difficult for the group to establish a connection to the labor market. This study introduces the Employment Readiness Indicator Questionnaire (ERIQ), a tool designed to assess individuals’ progress toward employment and evaluate employment readiness among disadvantaged social assistance recipients. ERIQ demonstrates impressive predictive abilities and points towards actionable recommendations by identifying malleable traits, such as social skills, coping strategies, goal orientation, and self-efficacy, that are significantly associated with finding employment. ERIQ emerges as a valuable resource for policymakers and practitioners, advancing the goal of promoting labor market participation for disadvantaged individuals.

Running two separate two-stage randomized trials, we implement and test three variants of a small group instruction intervention aimed at improving mathematics competencies for the 20% lowest achievers in mathematics in grades 2 and 8 in Danish public schools. We calculate immediate impacts on math competencies as well as impacts in the medium term and conduct cost-effectiveness analyses of the different intervention arms. The context is the Scandinavian welfare state with an already high-quality public school system. Nevertheless, we find very large positive and cost-effective impacts of several intervention variants, some of which persist in the medium term. In particular, interventions in grade 2 tend to persist, while eighth-grade interventions tend to fade out in the medium term.

We analyse three Danish experiments with combinations of early and intensive active labour market policy. We find that frequent individual meetings between newly unemployed workers and their caseworkers have substantial (and significant) effects on employment rates in both the medium and long run. Group meetings or an \"activation wall\" show positive but insignificant effects. Based on information on the costs of running the experiments, active labour programmes, and public transfer payments, we analyse the impact on government budgets and we show that individual meetings improved budgets with up to 4,500 euros per unemployed worker. We also look at the impact for subgroups.

ObjectivesMental disorders are associated with significant functional impairment, sickness absence and disability. The consequences of sickness absence warrant investigation into interventions aimed at enhancing return to work (RTW) for workers with mental disorders. The present systematic review and meta-analysis aim to synthesise evidence on the effectiveness of interventions aimed at enhancing RTW in sick-listed workers with mental disorders.MethodsEconLit, Embase, PsychInfo, PubMed, Svemed+ and Web of Science were searched for peer-reviewed, randomised or controlled studies assessing employment-related outcomes of interventions. A meta-analysis was conducted and meta-regressions were performed to explore prespecified potential sources of heterogeneity between studies.ResultsThe literature search yielded 3777 publications of which 42 (n=38 938) were included in the systematic review and 32 (n=9459) had appropriate data for the meta-analysis. The pooled effect size (95 % CI) was 0.14 (0.07 to 0.22). Meta-regressions revealed that the heterogeneity could not be attributed to study quality, timing of the intervention or length of the intervention. However, it could be partly explained by number of components included in the intervention, if the intervention included contact to the work place and by the disorder targeted by the intervention.ConclusionsThe results reveal strong evidence for interventions including contact to the work place and multicomponent interventions and moderate evidence for interventions including graded RTW. In addition, the results provide strong evidence for interventions targeting stress compared with interventions targeting other mental disorders. The findings point to important implications for policy and design of future interventions.

Identifying policy-relevant treatment effects from randomized experiments requires the absence of spillovers between participants and nonparticipants (SUTVA) or variation in observed treatment levels. We find that SUTVA is violated for a Danish activation program for unemployed workers. Using a difference-in-differences model, we show that nonparticipants in the experiment regions find jobs more slowly after the introduction of the program than workers in other regions. We estimate an equilibrium search model to identify the policy-relevant treatment effect. A large-scale rollout of the program is shown to decrease welfare, while a standard partial micro-econometric cost-benefit analysis concludes the opposite.

In this paper, we estimate the threat effect of active labour market programmes (ALMPs) for a sample of unemployed men in Denmark. Threat effects of such programmes capture the impacts of a system of ALMPs prior to actual participation. Rational economic agents make search decisions based on the expected discounted value of unemployment, and the perceived risk of future participation in programmes may affect job-search behaviour early in the unemployment spell. We find a strong and significant threat effect, which is shown to reduce average unemployment duration by two and a half weeks.

This article investigates the effects of homeownership on labour mobility and unemployment duration. We distinguish between finding employment locally or being geographically mobile. We find that homeownership hampers the propensity to move for job reasons, but improves the chances of finding local jobs, which is in accordance with the predictions from our theoretical model. The overall hazard rate into employment is higher for homeowners, such that there is a negative correlation between homeownership and unemployment duration. Our empirical findings thus contradict the so-called Oswald hypothesis, even if support is found for the main mechanism behind the hypothesis, namely that homeownership hampers mobility.