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About me

I am a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, where I completed my PhD in 2024. My dissertation was recently awarded the Best PhD Thesis Prize in Sociology by the European Consortium for Sociological Research (ECSR).

I study social stratification with a focus on education. My current research examines the potential and limitations of school interventions in reducing inequalities in educational outcomes by socioeconomic and ethnic background. Methodologically, I specialize in causal inference and often employ quasi-experimental designs to answer questions related to school choice, teacher effectiveness, and racial/ethnic discrimination.

Job Market Paper

A Muslim School Advantage? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

American Journal of Sociology (R&R, Sole-authored)

My job market paper asks a classic sociological question: do ethnic institutions foster or hinder minority incorporation? Using a natural experiment involving Muslim schools in Denmark, I examine whether minority-serving institutions help or impede the educational outcomes of ethnic minority students. I find that Muslim schools substantially improve academic achievement, largely by providing culturally aligned learning environments, with benefits that persist into upper secondary education and no evidence of diminished social integration. The findings contribute to broader debates on assimilation, ethnic institutions, and immigrant incorporation.

Publications

1. Teacher Sorting and Inequalities in Student Achievement: Unequal Exposures and Differential Returns to Teacher Qualifications
   Sociological Science [Abstract] [Code]
   Teachers play a formative role in shaping children’s school experiences and ultimately, their educational outcomes. In this study, I use full population Danish administrative data to explore the consequences of unequal access to qualified teachers in three steps. First, I document strong patterns of teacher–student sorting in Denmark, one of the world’s most equal societies and generous welfare states. In short, teachers from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and with higher prior academic achievements tend to select into schools serving high-achieving children from privileged backgrounds. Second, I investigate the effect of exposure to teachers with different qualifications on students’ test score performance. To facilitate causal estimates, I exploit plausibly exogenous shocks to teacher changes induced by parental leave spells, which, I show, are unrelated to an extensive set of observed classroom characteristics, including student well-being and measures of classroom climate. Third, I explore differentials in the impact of teacher qualifications by students’ socioeconomic background. I find no consistent evidence of differential teacher effects, implying that teacher-induced learning inequalities are mainly driven by unequal exposure to highly qualified teachers, rather than unequal returns to qualifications. This suggests that policies equalizing access to qualified teachers may reduce learning disparities.
2. Do Refugee Children Impair the Academic Performance of Native Children in the School? (with Camilla Hvidtfeldt, Lars H. Andersen, Rebecca O. Udsen) European Sociological Review [Abstract]
   Best Article of the Year Prize, ECSR, 2024
   Discussions concerning the social impact of accepting refugee immigrants arise each time large numbers of refugees apply for protection in rich countries. However, little evidence exists on how the integration of refugees into core welfare institutions affects native citizens who depend on and interact with these institutions. In this paper, we focus on whether receiving refugees in a school cohort affects the academic performance of natives, using administrative data from Denmark, which contain test scores on all children in public schools. We exploit variation in the timing of refugees’ entrance to schools to facilitate causal estimates. Our findings show that refugees tend to cluster in schools that had poorer performance even prior to the refugees’ arrival. When we take this selection pattern into account, the effect of receiving refugees on the academic performance trajectory of natives is both statistically insignificant and substantially unimportant.
3. The Importance of Living Arrangements for Criminal Persistence and Desistance: A Novel Test of Exposure to Convicted Family Members (with David Kirk, Lars H. Andersen) Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology [Abstract]
   Leveraging the richness of population register data in Denmark, this study provides an in-depth examination of the residential situations of the formerly incarcerated over the first 3 years after prison. These data allow us to examine precisely who former prisoners reside with after release, and whether the characteristics of housemates, such as prior conviction status, and relationship type, such as familial ties, are associated with criminal reconviction. While Denmark has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world, like many other Western countries, it is challenged by high recidivism rates among the formerly incarcerated. Using data on the population of all individuals released from prison between 1991 and 2014 and estimation via Cox proportional hazards models, we find that formerly incarcerated individuals who move into a residence with other individuals with criminal records have significantly greater hazards of reconviction, even after controlling for an extensive set of observed confounders. Residing with family members, particularly spouses, significantly reduces the likelihood of recidivism, but only if the family members do not have a recent criminal conviction. Results underscore the importance of housing arrangements and family ties during the post-release period.

Working Papers

• Schools and Learning Inequalities: A Theoretical Model of Quantitative and Qualitative School Effects (with Richard Breen) [Abstract]
  Do schools reduce or amplify learning gaps by socioeconomic background? In this paper, we contribute to this longstanding sociological debate in three ways. First, we develop a formal model that clarifies relevant theoretical estimands and counterfactuals. Second, our theoretical model synthesizes previously contradictory findings in the literature on schools and inequality by distinguishing between quantitative and qualitative school effects. Third, we empirically test a central hypothesis from our model: that the positive returns to improvements in school quality are concentrated among children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. To test this hypothesis, we use administrative register data from Denmark and a natural experiment design that relies on variation in school quality induced by unanticipated changes in school district boundaries over time. We show that children redistricted to higher-quality schools substantially improve their test score performance in reading, and, crucially, these effects are strongest among children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. These findings suggest that equalizing school quality can be an effective means of reducing learning inequalities.
• Parental Incarceration and Children's Educational Outcomes (Sole-authored) [Abstract]
  How does parental incarceration affect children's educational outcomes? I provide causal evidence on this question by combining full population register data containing detailed information on 16 Danish birth cohorts (N = 890,159) with a sibling fixed effects approach to identification. This strategy overcomes selection issues arising from unobserved family characteristics. On average, children who experience parental incarceration are 4 percentage points less likely to complete a high school degree by age 20, compared to their siblings who do not. These effects are largely concentrated among girls who experience substantially stronger detrimental effects of parental incarceration, compared to boys.
• Daughters Ahead, Sons Behind? Economic Mobility and Educational Choices among Children of Immigrants in Scandinavia (with Are Skeie Hermansen and Carina Mood) [Abstract]
  Can education equalize intergenerational economic mobility for the sons and daughters of immigrants? We examine this question using population-wide administrative data on cohorts born in the 1970s and 1980s in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. These Scandinavian welfare-state contexts constitute revealing cases because they combine open educational systems and high rates of social mobility with considerable immigration from low-income countries, alongside an increasing female advantage in educational attainment and rising concern about labor market disadvantage among less-educated men. We show that children of immigrants experience substantial upward earnings mobility relative to their parents, sharply reducing their overrepresentation at the bottom of the distribution. Conditional on parental earnings, they attain broadly similar earnings as native-origin peers from comparable family backgrounds. However, this convergence is strongly gendered, as daughters of immigrants often equal or exceed the mobility outcomes of native-origin women, whereas sons of immigrants lag behind comparable native-origin men. These differences are closely linked to educational attainment and field-of-study sorting. The findings show that education is central to immigrant mobility across generations, but its equalizing potential is primarily realized among women. Gendered educational trajectories produce gendered patterns of economic mobility, with broader implications for the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage among immigrant minorities.
• Social Class in the Classroom: Teacher–Student Socioeconomic Matching and Achievement (with Sara Geven) [Abstract]
  A substantial literature examines whether students benefit from being taught by teachers who share their gender or race, but little is known about socioeconomic matching, despite cultural capital theory's emphasis on social class as the basis for the cultural alignment between students and educational gatekeepers. We ask whether students' test performance depends on the socioeconomic match between them and their teachers. Using Danish administrative registers linking the full population of public-school students to their teachers by subject, year, and classroom (2013–2019), we triangulate across multiple sources of within-student variation—across subjects within a school year and across years within a subject—to address teacher-student sorting. Our findings show that exposure to low-SES teachers is associated with higher reading scores among low-SES students, with a similar but weaker pattern in mathematics, while high-SES students appear unaffected by their teachers' socioeconomic background. The findings reposition teachers as active mediators in the reproduction of educational inequality.
• Multi-Dimensional Teacher Value-Added: Characterizing "the Good Teacher" (with Miriam Gensowski) [Abstract]
  We examine teachers' value added not just for their student's achievement test scores but also students' non-cognitive skills -- well-being, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability, subjective achievement, as well as behavioral measures (absenteeism). With self-reported and direct measures of these skills, rather than only behavioral proxies or teacher-rated measures, we confirm that teachers contribute significantly to the development of their students' multi-dimensional skills. Yet we challenge prior findings that teachers who promote test scores are not the same as teachers promoting non-test-score outcomes -- we find that this is only true for the behavioral proxies. Value-added in self-reported socio-emotional skills are positively correlated with test-score value-added. With access to administrative register data on teachers as well as students, we attempt to characterize high-value-added teachers. Only few observable teacher characteristics successfully predict teacher value-added in socio-emotional skills, behavior, and test scores.