Many writers have expressed a concern that growing educational assortative mating will lead to greater inequality between households in their earnings or income. In this article, we examine the relationship between educational assortative mating and income inequality in Denmark between 1987 and 2006. Denmark is widely known for its low level of income inequality, but the Danish case provides a good test of the relationship between educational assortative mating and inequality because although income inequality increased over the period we consider, educational homogamy declined. Using register data on the exact incomes of the whole population, we find that change in assortative mating increased income inequality but that these changes were driven by changes in the educational distributions of men and women rather than in the propensity for people to choose a partner with a given level of education.

In this article, we exploit a Danish criminal justice reform that dramatically decreased the risk of incarceration for individuals convicted of some types of crimes to isolate how having a father who was eligible for a noncustodial sentence under the reform affected a child's risk of ever subsequently being charged with a crime. Specifically, we use a difference‐in‐differences framework to compare all Danish children 12–18 years of age whose fathers were eligible for a noncustodial sentence instead of incarceration under the reform [N = 1,546] with a reference group of children whose fathers were convicted of similar crimes but were ineligible [N = 1,852] in the 2 years surrounding when the reform was enacted [July 1, 2000] as a way of testing the effects of the reform on children's risk of ever being charged with a crime by 22–28 years of age. Our estimates indicate that having a father sentenced under the reform sharply decreased the risk of being charged in the next 10 years for boys but not for girls. Taken together, these results indicate that both paternal criminality and paternal incarceration promote the criminal justice contact of male children and, hence, that paternal incarceration is not solely a symptom of criminality but also a cause of it.

An analysis is conducted as to whether social class position matters for the negative change in subjective well-being experienced from unemployment. Theory on work identification and work conditions is used to formulate hypotheses on the differential impact on well-being of entering unemployment from different social classes. Data are analyzed from 14 waves of the British Household Panel Survey, and fixed effects methods are used. Main results are that the negative effect of job loss on subjective well-being is highest for individuals who are in the middle classes prior to becoming unemployed.

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Objective:The objective of this study was to test how a father's paternity leave affects the within-household gender wage gap among heterosexual couples. Background: Previous studies focus on the actual number of days of leave the father takes, but if an important driver of the gender wage gap is the effect of parental leave on gender-specific household specialization, absolute variations in the father's leave should not be the key interest. Instead, this article tests the effect of the extent of the father's leave relative to that of the mother's leave because it is this variation that plausibly affects the division of household labor and through this the within-household gender wage gap. Method: Full sample, administrative data are from Statistics Denmark. Causal inference was facilitated by exploiting 5 Danish parental leave reforms on 5 separate samples of all households who become first-time parents within the year before and after each reform (N 1 = 2,304; N 2 = 45,683; N 3 = 16,668; N 4 = 42,328; N 5 = 38,978).