Lars Højsgaard Andersen

The Rockwool Foundation · Research Unit

Persons deemed a danger to themselves, others, or gravely disabled may receive involuntary psychiatric commitment if family, other residents, law enforcement, or clinicians initiate this process. On September 30, 2005, a Danish newspaper published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. This publication led to the worst foreign policy crisis in De...

This paper studies the effects of a large welfare benefit reduction on the children in the affected families. The welfare cut targeted adult refugees who received residency in Denmark, and it reduced their disposable income by 30 percent on average over the first five years. We show that children exposed to the welfare cut during preschool and scho...

Importance Childhood exposure to mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is common. Individuals with a childhood history of mTBI experience more frequent criminal justice involvement in mid to late adolescence and adulthood. No study had been conducted to examine whether the link is causal or spurious. Objective To determine whether mTBI in childhood c...

Objective To discuss how methods to estimate heterogenous causal effects can be applied in Family Science and to supply empirical examples using the case of fatherhood and earnings. Background Many questions important to family scientists do not focus on one‐size‐fits‐all average effects but rather on whether and how effects differ across groups....

This paper analyzes the effects of Denmark’s Start Aid welfare reform that targets refugees. Implemented in 2002, it enables us to study not only the reform’s immediate effects but also its longer-term consequences and its repeal a decade later. The reform-induced large transfer cuts led to an increase in employment rates, but only in the short run...

Introduction: Economic downturns may precede reduced social tolerance towards the mentally ill that, in turn, may manifest as increased reporting of disordered individuals for involuntary psychiatric commitments (reduced tolerance hypothesis). In some instances, societies may also act out against vulnerable minority groups during economic downturns...

Background Early studies of common mental disorders (CMDs) during the COVID-19 pandemic mainly report increases; however, more recent findings have been mixed. Also, studies assessing the effects of restriction measures on CMDs show varied results. The aim of this meta-analysis was to assess changes in levels of CMDs from pre-/early to during the p...

Background Global estimates suggest strained mental health during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the lack of nationally representative and longitudinal data with clinically validated measures limits knowledge longer into the pandemic. Methods Data from 10 rounds of nationally representative surveys from Denmark tracked trends in risk...

Nordic criminal policy evaluation has unique features, such as ones related to policy context, policy content, and the availability of excellent register data. This paper briefly lays out these features and argues that the future of Nordic criminal policy evaluation could well lie in exploiting these features even more. It is argued that we should...

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 foc...

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 pr...

Background Violence on the job has been shown to harm both physical and psychosocial health, but the results presented in existing studies might be biased because they have not considered prior indicators of such health. Methods Physical violence and threats were pooled into a measure of workplace violence for 77,388 randomly sampled respondents f...

Objectives To examine the short-term effects of admission requirements for upper secondary vocational education and training (VET) on enrollment and criminal offending among academically low-achieving boys. Methods We apply multi-group difference-in-differences models to full population data and analyze an educational policy reform in Denmark ( N...

Objectives To measure the effect of arranged marriages on criminal convictions among male ethnic minority youth in Denmark. Methods To identify the effect, we rely on administrative data from before and after a national policy reform in 2002 that restricted ethnic minority youths’ access to their most prevalent type of marriage until both spouses...

It was highlighted that the original article [1] contained some errors in the references. The title of reference [2] was incorrect and a new reference had to be added and cited in the Discussion section of the text. This correction article shows the correct reference [2], the new reference [3] and its in-text citation. The reference list in the tex...

Abstract Background Existing estimates of the impact of the COVID-19 burden on mental wellbeing come from countries with high mortality rates. This study therefore aimed to investigate the impact of the first COVID-19 lockdown (March–April 2020) on risk for stress/depression and functional impairment in a representative sample of adult individuals...

Objective This study examines whether the intergenerational transmission of crime depends on family complexity. Background Research has found a substantial intergenerational transmission of crime. But the focus on biological parents in such research tends to not fully align with current demographic trends—which emphasize increasing family complexi...

Background This study aimed to investigate the impact of the first COVID-19 lockdown (March-April 2020) on risk for stress/depression and functional impairment in a representative sample of adult individuals in Denmark, and whether the impact of lockdown was heterogeneous across living situation. Methods: Using a representative, randomly drawn samp...

Using unique Danish register data that allow for comparisons across both conviction and incarceration status, this article analyzes the association between pretrial detention and work, family attachment, and recidivism. We find that pretrial detention may impose unique social costs, apart from conviction or additional punishments. Most notably, men...

Objectives Measure the impact of swifter punishment on the timing of first imprisonment and on criminal recidivism among young violent offenders. Methods A policy reform in 1994 promoted swifter case processing for violent offenders in Denmark. I exploit Danish administrative data and this policy reform as a natural experiment to measure the impac...

Being placed in restrictive housing is considered one of the most devastating experiences a human can endure, yet a scant amount of research has been conducted to test how this experience affects core indicators of prisoner reentry such as employment and recidivism. In this article, we use Danish registry data, which allow for us to link penal cond...

Background: With more than 10 million people incarcerated worldwide, some of whom will have experienced solitary confinement, a better understanding of health and mortality after release is needed. The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between placement in solitary confinement and mortality in the 5 years following release among for...

There is growing evidence that incarceration is associated with adverse health outcomes, but little is known about how circumstances surrounding incarceration relate to health. In the present study, we estimate the effect of timing of incarceration on mental health using panel data constructed from the Danish population registry. We exploit a 1994...

Research on the intergenerational transmission of incarceration tends to emphasize the strong association between fathers' involvement with the criminal justice system and sons' behavioral outcomes, such as experiencing incarceration. The father–son association in incarceration risks is, however, not the only mechanism through which these risks may...

With marriage comes in-laws, and if the in-laws include delinquent males, their delinquency could affect the prosocial effects of the given marriage. In this article, I focus on the effect of having a convicted brother-in-law as a general indicator of this broader phenomenon of family-formation processes impairing the positive impact of marriage on...

BACKGROUND Over the recent decades and across most developed democracies, youth crime has been in steady decline, and declining youth crime now constitutes an important contemporary demographic change. Yet underneath this change lingers the question of how we should best grasp declining youth crime. OBJECTIVE To decompose declining youth crime in D...

Crime and subsequent imprisonment reduces men's chances on the marriage market and increases their divorce risk, but existing research, with a few notable exceptions, is silent about the underlying mechanisms driving these effects. This article studies the effect of home confinement under electronic monitoring as a noncustodial alternative to impri...

Existing studies of the consequences of paternal incarceration for children treat paternal incarceration as a dichotomous event (a child either experiences paternal incarceration or does not), although effects could accumulate with both the frequency and duration of paternal incarcerations. In this article I use register data on Danish children fro...

Employment plays a crucial role in the re-entry process and in reducing recidivism among offenders released from prison. But at the same time, imprisonment is generally regarded as harmful to post-release employment prospects. Little is known, however, about whether or not offenders’ employment trajectories before and after imprisonment are similar...

Background: No research has estimated the cumulative risk of paternal or maternal incarceration in any country other than the U.S., so it remains unclear how much more likely U.S. children are to be exposed to parental incarceration than children living in other countries. Objective: To estimate the cumulative risks of paternal and maternal incarce...

The authors analyzed whether the effect of marriage on recidivism varied by spousal criminality. For this purpose, they used propensity score matching and full population data from Statistics Denmark on all unmarried and previously convicted men from birth cohorts 1965–1985 (N = 102,839). The results showed that marriage reduced recidivism compared...

Objectives: Use a unique dataset to pair probation and parole officers and their clients in Denmark in 2002–2009 to identify causal effects of these officers on labor market out- comes and recidivism. Methods: To identify these effects, we rely on data from all probationers and parolees in Copenhagen, where a rotational assignment process randomize...

Research Summary We studied the effect on social welfare dependence of serving a sentence under electronic monitoring rather than in prison using Danish registry data and two policy shifts that extended the use of electronic monitoring in Denmark. We found that electronic monitoring is less harmful than imprisonment, at least for younger offenders,...