Rasmus Landersø, Rockwool Fonden

The Making and Unmaking of Opportunity: Educational Mobility in 20th Century-Denmark

Abstract

We study intergenerational educational mobility over a century during which the comprehensive Danish welfare state was rolled out. While mobility was low early in the 20th century, schooling reforms benefiting children from disadvantaged backgrounds led to dramatic increases in mobility for cohorts born in the 1940s through the 1960s. However, despite highly progressive education policies, the college and university expansion affecting cohorts born in the 1970s and 1980s has mainly benefited children from affluent backgrounds, leading to rapidly declining mobility. Moreover, the link between schooling and skills has changed over the century, with non-cognitive skills becoming an increasingly important component.

Rasmus Landersø is a Senior Researcher at the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit.
He is also an associate member of the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD) and the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) working group, a research fellow at Center for Research & Analysis of Migration (CReAM), Research Associate at IZA, and associate editor of the Journal of Human Capital.

His main research fields are Applied micro., Labor economics, Economics of Crime, and Origins of inequality in skills and opportunity.

Landesø's research includes work on social mobility, the role of cognitive and noncognitive skills, and the origins of criminal behavior over the life-course.

Landersø received his B.A. and M.Sc. in Economics from the University of Copenhagen in 2008 and 2010, respectively. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Aarhus University in 2015.