Anders Pretzmann Gotfredsen

Working Wonders? The Impact of Student Employment on Educational Performance
2023 | Kraka publication | Media coverage

Part time work is a central part of many students’ lives. Despite this, few Danish studies have looked at how employment affects educational performance. I use new quasi-experimental evidence from the 2021 Covid-19 lockdown in Denmark to investigate whether employed students in primary and secondary school received a lower or higher GPA (Grade Point Average) when involuntarily sent home from work. Employing a conditional Difference-in-Differences approach, I find a mostly negligible causal impact of student employment on GPA.

Imprisoned and Employed: The Effect of Electronic Monitoring on Life Outcomes
2025 | With Rune Schmidt Qvist
Electronic monitoring is seen as an attractive alternative to incarceration by lowering prison expenditures and allowing prisoners to stay in employment or education during their sentence. Consequently, electronic monitoring is now used extensively in many countries, including Denmark. However, there may be important second-order effects on prisoners’ labor market and educational outcomes, as well as future criminal activity, making the fiscal effect of electronic monitoring theoretically ambiguous. We leverage four Danish reforms between 2006 and 2013 to estimate the effect of electronic monitoring on prisoners’ labor market outcomes, education, and recidivism using both a difference-in-differences design and a regression discontinuity design. Our findings suggest that serving with electronic monitoring instead of in a prison tends to modestly increase employment and income for prisoners in the years following their release. However, the estimates are often insignificant. For education, we find a consistent null effect, and for recidivism we get mixed results.