Welcome
I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the NHH Norwegian School of Economics and a Research Fellow at the Pension Research Centre (PeRCent).
My research focuses on macroeconomics, labor, public, and pension economics. I have a PhD in Economics from the Copenhagen Business School.
Download my CV.
Interests
- Macroeconomics
- Public Economics
- Labor Economics
Education
PhD in Economics, 2023
Copenhagen Business School
MSc in Economics and Finance, 2018
Copenhagen Business School
BSc in Economics, 2015
University of Zurich
News
Research Updates
March 2025: Our handbook chapter “Life Expectancy, Retirement Age, and Pension Wealth” is now available online: here!
December 2025: New Working Paper on old workers' willingness to pay for job amenities!
Working Papers
Labor Supply vs. Demand of Older Workers: A Structural Approach with Stated Preferences
joint with Max Groneck and Johanna WalleniusMany workers retire abruptly from full-time employment, a pattern that standard life-cycle models with smooth preferences over leisure and consumption struggle to reconcile. This suggests that factors other than those governing preferences for labor supply -- such as institutional and demand-side forces, including firms' limited willingness to offer part-time work to older employees -- play an important role. Distinguishing between these supply- and demand-side factors is challenging, as both shape observed labor supply behavior. We address this challenge by developing a new identification strategy that combines observational data with stated preferences for part-time work from strategic survey questions. Our preliminary results reveal that prime-aged men do not want to work part-time, exhibiting negative willingness to pay to reduce hours worked. However, their willingness to pay for part-time work becomes positive and sizable close to retirement age. In contrast, female reservation wages are sharply rising in hours worked, indicating that women do not want to work full-time. Viewed through the lens of our structural life-cycle model, these patterns are consistent with a large labor supply elasticity for women, and a slightly smaller elasticity for men.
Presentations: Young Swiss Economists Meeting 2026; University of Groningen
Population Aging, Public Finances, and Alternatives for Retirement Reform
joint with Frederik Bjørn ChristensenWe study retirement reforms that ensure sustainable public finances in the face of population aging. We build a structural life-cycle model with a pension scheme that includes a public pay-as-you-go pillar and a mandatory fully-funded pillar. The two pillars interact through a means-testing mechanism. The higher the fully-funded benefit, the lower the public pay-as-you-go benefit. The interaction allows us to assess a reform in which increases in fully-funded contributions and benefits reduce public pension benefits through means testing. We compare this reform to three alternatives: Increasing the retirement age, cutting public benefits, and increasing taxes to finance growing public pension expenditures. We estimate the model to Danish micro data and find that expanding fully-funded pensions to indirectly lower public pensions yields the highest welfare. Among the remaining reforms, we show that directly lowering public benefits outperforms hiking taxes and increasing the retirement age.
Presentations: Statistics Norway (SSB); Oslo Macro Conf. 2024; ISI Delhi; University of Barcelona; IIM Bangalore; Netspar Workshop 2025; Danish Central Bank; OECD Econ Department; 2nd Arne Ryde Workshop in Lund*; Annual Congress of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics 2024; 45th Annual Meeting of the Norwegian Association of Economists; End-Of-Year Conference of Swiss Economists Abroad 2022; Iowa State University* — (*) Presentation by co-author
Raising the Bar: Pension Age Reforms, Labor Supply, Welfare Dependence, and Taxes
joint with Frederik Bjørn Christensen, Svend Erik Hougaard Jensen, and Miguel Sousa DuarteWe study the effects of a six-month increase in the early and full pension eligibility ages in Denmark using a regression discontinuity design. We track individuals for 12 years post-reform announcement and estimate comprehensive behavioral responses in labor supply, pension and welfare claims and and both private pension and non-pension savings. We find no upstream labor effects in the years between the reform announcement and the affected eligibility ages. In contrast, employment increases and retirement is delayed at each postponed threshold, including the full retirement age, where—unlike at the early retirement ages—no discrete financial incentives can account for the response. We also document midstream and downstream labor supply adjustments, indicating that responses extend beyond narrow claiming windows. Despite evidence of both active and passive substitution into alternative welfare programs, these spillovers remain limited, and the reform yields a substantial positive net fiscal effect. Cumulative savings rise substantially, with a non-trivial large effect around the full retirement age. The overall responses are disproportionately driven by salaried workers with low liquid and pension wealth, whereas the self-employed and pension-wealth-rich individuals adjust significantly less.
Presentations: PeRCent Annual Conference 2024; Colloque Retraite et Vieillissement, Paris*; Workshop on Consumption and Saving over the Life Cycle, Iceland* — (*) Presentation by co-author
Willingness to pay for job characteristics in later life: Evidence from a stated choice experiment
joint with Max Groneck, Tunga Kantarci, and Johanna WalleniusThis paper studies older workers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for changes in working hours, flexibility, physical demands, and stress using a tailored survey module fielded in the Dutch LISS panel. Respondents aged 45–75 completed a sequence of strategic survey questions that elicited reservation wages for jobs identical to their reference job as well as for jobs differing in a single attribute. This design allows a clean separation between attachment to existing job bundles and valuations of marginal changes in job characteristics. We find substantial and asymmetric valuations: workers demand sizeable compensation to accept more demanding conditions, while willingness to pay for improvements is more modest and highly heterogeneous. Gender differences are pronounced for working hours, whereas valuations of flexibility, physical demands, and stress are broadly similar for men and women. Age gradients are limited overall, with increasing aversion to strenuous and stressful work at older ages.
Publications
Social Welfare Effects of Annuitization in Small Open Economies
The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, AcceptedThis paper develops a theory of when annuitization improves or reduces social welfare. The analysis is based on a small open economy with exogenous prices, populated by overlapping generations of non-altruistic agents. Annuities provide longevity risk insurance and above-market returns, but also reduce accidental bequests that transfer resources from the old to the young. I show that the welfare trade-off between these channels is governed by the interest rate: above a threshold, the cost of reducing bequests dominates and no annuitization is socially optimal; below it, partial annuitization improves welfare. Socially optimal allocations can be implemented by mandating a savings portfolio with a predetermined share invested in annuities. Governments that instead mandate annuities through fully-funded pensions cannot replicate these allocations, even when annuity markets are missing and agents cannot borrow against future benefits. Although derived for small open economies, the results provide a benchmark for identifying when annuitization raises or lowers welfare and presumably extend to closed economies, where the boundary may still depend on the rate of return but now through threshold values of the parameters that determine it.
Life Expectancy, Retirement Age, and Pension Wealth
Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics, 2026 joint with Svend Erik Hougaard Jensen and Miguel Sousa DuartePopulation aging has led several countries to adopt policies that link the retirement age to life expectancy. Although such policies may be necessary to keep public finances sustainable, they risk increasing socioeconomic inequalities. Individuals with lower socioeconomic status tend to live shorter lives, collect benefits for fewer years, and may therefore be disproportionately burdened by increases in the retirement age, potentially undermining the intended progressivity of pension systems. An additional challenge is that the growing accumulation of private pension wealth may reduce the effectiveness of public pension reforms, as wealthier individuals can afford to retire early regardless of changes to the statutory retirement age. This chapter examines these dynamics and presents a range of policy options to best align pension design with demographic, socioeconomic, and fiscal realities.
Stock market evidence on the international transmission channels of US monetary policy surprises
Journal of International Money and Finance, Volume 136, 102866, 2023 joint with Thomas NitschkaWe reveal the economic sources of the stock market responses of 40 countries to US monetary policy surprises by decomposing stock market returns into components reflecting investors’ revisions in expectations (news) about future cash flows and different components of discount rates. US monetary policy surprises have persistent effects on foreign stock markets because they primarily constitute cash flow news. This finding pertains to different measures of the surprises. The liquidity of stock markets and the perceived country risk affect the sensitivities of unexpected stock market returns to the US monetary policy surprises while other country characteristics, e.g., the exchange rate regime, have no effect.
Work in Progress
Do Means-Tested Pensions Undermine the Effectiveness of Retirement Age Increases?
joint with Svend Erik Hougaard Jensen and Miguel Sousa DuarteInequality in Longevity and Redistribution in Public Pension Schemes
joint with Frederik Bjørn Christensen
Technical work
A toolkit for solving overlapping generations models with family-linked bequest and intergenerational skill transmission
joint with Frederik Bjørn ChristensenSome papers incorporate family-linked bequest and intergenerational transmission of skills in life-cycle models to match empirical wealth distributions. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of these papers offer a comprehensive guide on their solution methods. Thus, the contribution of this paper is to develop a detailed toolkit on how to solve, simulate, and estimate an overlapping generations model with family-linked accidental and voluntary bequest, intergenerational transmission of skills, persistent idiosyncratic income risk, permanent income heterogeneity, and retirement. This model reasonably matches empirical measures of wealth inequality. Extending our model by a public sector would constitute a suitable framework to study the effects of policy reforms on wealth inequality.
Teaching
Pension Economics, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022
Copenhagen Business School, Full Degree Master, Link to course
Empirical Macroeconomics and Finance, 2026 (scheduled),2025
Norwegian School of Economics, Full Degree Master, Link to course
Computational Macroeconomics, 2024, 2021
University of Kansas, PhD-level, Link to course
Iowa State University
Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi
Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
Financial Econometrics, 2018
Copenhagen Business School, Msc Advanced Economics and Finance
Applied Econometrics, 2017
Copenhagen Business School, Msc Applied Economics and Finance
Code
On my GitHub page, I share lectures and sample code on how to solve and estimate life cycle models with overlapping generations.