We examine the extent to which the gender wage gap may depend on the fact that dual-earner couples must jointly choose a place to live and work. If couples systematically locate in places better suited for the advancement of the husband’s career than to the wife’s, those choices would then tend to depress the wages of married women relative to married men. Examining data from Denmark, our results suggest (i) that Danish couples weight men’s potential wage gains much more heavily than women’s in their decisions of whether to and where to move, (ii) that these intra-couple preferences may account for as much as 36% of the gender wage gap in Denmark, and (iii) that, ultimately, these differential weightings appear to reflect gender roles, to a large extent inherited from the wife’ parents. We therefore demonstrate that systematic gender inequality can emerge from unexpected places and processes.

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I have been using Dropbox for a long time to sync my research and teaching files between computers and other devices. It is a great tool for co-authoring as well, where you can keep co-authors completely up to date with instant syncing. However, during this summer, there has been a number of concerns about Dropbox’s security and privacy. First, Dropbox changed its terms of service and specified that “if the government asks, they will have to decrypt user’s files and turn them over” (Business Insider). This led to a number of discussion about whether Dropbox could see your files stored. Dropbox addressed these concerns with a blog post. Second, on June 19, an authentication bug caused all Dropbox accounts to be open for four hours. Since then there has been a large discussion about Dropbox security and encryption keys.

This has led me and others to look at least look at the alternatives. One of them is SpiderOak. SpiderOak is cross-platform and works with Windows, Mac and Linux simultaneously. It offers 2-factor authentication:

2-Factor Authentication provides an additional layer of security on top of password protection. In other words, if someone were to compromise your username and password, these two elements alone would not be enough to allow them to access your SpiderOak account.

In addition, the encryption keys are handled locally at your machine and not at SpiderOak. This is not the case with Dropbox.

I started using SpiderOak for my more sensitive files. It offers to backup files from your computer and/or to keep files in sync between selected computers. I find that it is just as fast as Dropbox and works just as seamlessly in the background.

Try SpiderOak with the 2GB free account. If you use this link you will get an additional 1GB!

This article analyzes the relationship between organizational change and employee health. It illuminates the potentially negative outcomes of change at the level of the employee. In addition, it relates to the ongoing debate over how employees react to and respond to organizational change. I hypothesize that change increases the risk of negative stress, and I test this hypothesis using a comprehensive panel data set of all stress-related medicine prescriptions for 92,860 employees working in 1,517 of the largest Danish organizations. The findings suggest that the risk of receiving stress-related medication increases significantly for employees at organizations that change, especially those that undergo broad simultaneous changes along several dimensions. Thus, organizational changes are associated with significant risks of employee health problems. These effects are further explored with respect to employees at different hierarchical levels as well as at firms of different sizes and from different sectors.

Management Science, Vol. 53, No. 2, pp. 240-256 (2011) Download here [DOI Link]

Aims: Entering entrepreneurship (i.e. becoming an entrepreneur) is known to be a demanding activity with increased workload, financial uncertainty and increased levels of stress. However, there are no systematic studies on how entering entrepreneurship affects the people involved.

Methods: The authors investigated prescriptions of psychotropics for 6,221 first-time entrepreneurs from 2001—2004 and their 2,381 spouses in the first two years after becoming entrepreneurs in a matched case-control study using linked data from three Danish national registries: The Danish database for Labor Market Research, the Danish Entrepreneurship database and the Danish Prescription database.

Results: Entrepreneurs were more likely to fill prescriptions at pharmacies for sedatives/hypnotics (adjusted odds ratio (AOR): 1.45 [95% CI: 1.26—1.66], p < .0001). However, they were less likely to fill prescriptions for antidepressants (AOR: 0.74 [95% CI: 0.59—0.92] p = 0.007). Spouses of these entrepreneurs were also more likely to fill prescriptions for sedatives/hypnotics (AOR: 1.36 [95% CI: 1.10—1.67], p = 0.005). No difference in prescription of antidepressants was found for spouses.

Conclusions: This study showed that there was a significant relation between entering entrepreneurship and receiving prescriptions for sedative/hypnotics both among the entrepreneurs themselves and their spouses, suggesting that entering entrepreneurship may be associated with increased stress for both the entrepreneurs and their families.

Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, Vol. 38, No. 8, pp. 857-863 (2010)

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From the EMR website:

EMR Best Paper Award – Annual Prize

We are delighted to announce the inauguration of an EMR ‘Best Paper Award’. The recipients are Michael Dahl and Olav Sorensen for their paper, ‘The Embedded Entrepreneur’, which appeared in Volume 6, Issue 3 of the Journal. The winners received a prize of €1000, and certificates were presented at the recent EURAM conference in Rome.

Entrepreneurs, even more than employees, tend to locate in regions in which they have deep roots (‘home’ regions). Here, we examine the performance implications of these choices. Whereas one might expect entrepreneurs to perform better in these regions because of their richer endowments of regionally-embedded social capital, they might also perform worse if their location choices rather reflect a preference for spending time with family and friends. We examine this question using comprehensive data on Danish startups. Ventures perform better – survive longer and generate greater annual profits and cash flows – when located in regions in which their founders have lived longer. This effect appears substantial, similar in size to the value of prior experience in the industry (i.e. to being a spinoff).

Accepted for publication in Management Science – Download working paper on SSRN

This paper explores the firm growth rate distribution in a Gibrat’s Law context. The aim is to provide an empirical exploration of the determinants of firm growth. The work is novel in two respects. First, rather than limiting the analysis to focus on the conditional mean growth level, we investigate the complete shape of the distribution. Second, we show that the differences in the firm growth rate process between large and small firms are highly circumstantial. That industry dynamics have a substantial influence on the relationship between firm size and firm growth. The data used includes more than 9000 Danish firms from manufacturing, services and construction. We provide robust evidence indicating that firm growth studies should be less obsessed with explaining means and instead look to other parts of the firm growth rate distribution.

Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 219-231 (2010)

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Download the first draft on SSRN.

Link to abstract, DOI link to paper