The local labor market effects of relocating central government jobs to cities in rural municipalities is investigated by considering two small-scale interventions by the Danish government in the mid-2000s. We leverage the Synthetic Control Method to compare the two affected municipalities to a synthetic counterfactual. Results show that relocating central government jobs: (1) increased government employment; (2) had no impact on private employment; and (3) had little impact on diversity even if (1) and (2) suggest otherwise. These results add new insights into the effects of small-scale relocations relative to previous contributions.

We explore the role of elites for development and the spread of industrialized dairying in Denmark in the 1880s. We demonstrate that the location of early proto-modern dairies, introduced by landowning elites from northern Germany in the eighteenth century, explains the location of industrialized dairying in 1890: an increase of one standard deviation in elite influence increases industrialized dairying by 56 percent of the mean exposure in one specification. We interpret this as evidence for a spread of ideas from the elites to the peasantry, which we capture through measures of specialization in dairying and demand for education and identify a causal relationship using an instrument based on distance to the influential first mover. Finally, we demonstrate that areas with cooperatives enjoyed greater wealth by the twentieth century, and that they are today associated with other Danish cultural attributes: a belief in democracy and individualism.

The Malthusian model is the subject of a fierce debate within economic history. Although the positive causal relationship postulated from living standards to population growth is relatively uncontroversial for preindustrial societies, this cannot be said for the other key relationship, diminishing returns due to fixed supplies of land. We argue that Denmark, which was characterized by extreme resource and environmental constraints until the final decades of the eighteenth century, provides an ideal setting for testing whether any society was ever truly Malthusian. We employ a cointegrated VAR model on Danish data from 1731 to 1800, finding evidence for diminishing returns until ca. 1775. Yet this relationship disappears in the late-eighteenth century, consistent with an increasing pace of technological progress and the emergence of what Unified Growth Theory has termed the “post-Malthusian” era.

We exploit a large historical shock to the Danish labour market to provide evidence of how restrictions on labour mobility increase monopsony power and thereby reduce wages. By severely limiting the possibility of the rural population to work beyond their place of birth, the reintroduction of serfdom in 1733 aimed to increase monopsony power and secure cheaper labour in the countryside. Using a unique data source based on the archives of estates from the eighteenth century, we test whether serfdom affected the wages of farmhands more strongly than other groups in the labour market, and results based on a difference-in-differences approach reveal evidence consistent with a strong negative effect following its introduction. This is confirmed when we use a different control group from the Swedish province of Scania. We also investigate whether one mechanism was that boys with rural backgrounds were prevented from taking up apprenticeships in towns and find suggestive evidence that this was indeed the case.

We exploit high-quality vital statistics data and annual income data, obtained from historical municipality tax records, to study the economic aftermath of the 1918-influenza epidemic in Denmark. We find that average income followed a V-shaped path from 1917 to 1919 and (if anything) municipalities with higher 1918-influenza mortality rates experienced more pronounced declines and recoveries. In addition, national month-by-industry unemployment data show that unemployment rates were high during the epidemic, but decreased again a couple of months after the epidemic receded. Evidence from the Danish stock market exchange also indicates that the epidemic only had short-lived effects on the economy.

We document and make available to the scholarly community a uniquely detailed database of 20,680 observations of wages for men, women, and children and 30,000 observations of prices from eighteenth-century rural Denmark. These microlevel data were originally collected by the Danish Price History Project but have not previously been released. To illustrate the usefulness of such data, we discuss possible applications.

We analyze the link between "too big to fail" (TBTF) and moral hazard using a natural experiment from an epoch of unregulated commercial banking in Denmark. In 1908 the country faced a large banking shock where the creditors of distressed commercial banks received a bailout by the government for the first time in Danish history. Due to a fortuitous combination of circumstances, banks continued to operate in an unregulated environment for more than a decade after the bailout. By considering a sample from a pre-regulation epoch, we isolate the TBTF effect. Our empirical analysis shows that TBTF banks significantly reduced post-bailout capital ratios compared to other banks.

In Denmark, many rural schools have been closed since 2000. These school closures have often resulted in heated debates between local politicians and the local population. Locals have feared that closing their school would have adverse effects and lead to local population decline. Meanwhile, previous research has found mixed evidence on the population effect of rural school closures. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the existing literature by looking at the case of Denmark. The paper analyses the local population effects of the simultaneous closure of eight village schools in 2011 in the same peripheral municipality in Denmark. The case study offers a quasi-experimental setting, and the population effects are estimated through an ordinary and a flexible difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis. Overall, the results show clear evidence of a negative population effect of rural school closures. The ordinary DiD analysis shows a population decline of 7.6 percentage points during the 10-year post-closure period. The flexible DiD analysis points to long-term effects, as the population decline first becomes statistically significant from the sixth year following the closures and onwards. To qualify the results of the econometric tests, we report findings from interviews with local people carried out in 2015 in four of the eight rural communities. Among other things, findings from interviews point to lock-in effects in terms of social capital and housing markets, which helps to understand the dominance of long-term population effects from school closures.

This paper studies the immediate and long-run health effects of the first community-based health intervention in the world – the Framingham Health and Tuberculosis Demonstration, 1917–1923. The official evaluation committee and the historical narrative suggest that the Demonstration was highly successful in controlling tuberculosis and reducing mortality. Using newly digitized annual cause-of-death data for municipalities in Massachusetts, 1901–1934, and different empirical strategies, we find little evidence to support this positive assessment. Although we find that the Demonstration increased the identification of new TB case, this did not translate into reductions in tuberculosis mortality, total mortality, or infant mortality. This evidence contributes to an ongoing debate on whether public health interventions mattered for the historical decline in (tuberculosis) mortality prior to modern medicine and may help us to understand how to lower the burden of tuberculosis in the developing world today.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a leading cause of death worldwide and while treatable by antibiotics since the 1940s, drug resistant strains have emerged. This article estimates the effects of the establishment of a pre-antibiotic public health institution, known as a TB dispensary, designed to prevent the spread of the disease. Our annual difference-in-differences estimation reveals that the rollout of the dispensaries across Danish cities led to a 19% decline in the TB mortality rate, but no significant impacts on other diseases when performing placebo regressions. We next take advantage of the dispensaries explicit targeting on TB to setup a triple-differences model which exploits other diseases as controls and obtain a similar magnitude of the effect. As for the mechanism, the evidence highlights the dispensaries’ preventive actions, such as information provision. At an estimated cost as low as 68 dollars per saved life-year, this particular public-health institution was extraordinarily cost effective. Overall, our evidence suggests a policy for developing countries to combat drug resistant TB.