Frederik Bjørn Christensen

Ph.D. candidate, Copenhagen Business School

Frederik Bjørn Christensen

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of Economics

Copenhagen Business School

Porcelænshaven 16A

2000 Frederiksberg

Denmark

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Job Market Candidate

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Economics at Copenhagen Business School.

My research interests are macroeconomics, public policy, demography, welfare, and inequality. My work combines computational models and micro data to analyze pertinent policy issues.

I will be on the 2022/2023 European and American academic job market. In my job-market paper, I study the economic and social consequences of different retirement reforms in the face of population aging. For the policy analysis, I develop a computational life-cycle model and estimate it structurally on Danish register data.


Education

Ph.D. in Economics, since 2019
Copenhagen Business School

M.Sc., Economics and Business Administration, 2017-2019
Aarhus University

B.A., Economics and Business Administration, 2013-2016
Aarhus University

Working Papers

Job-market Paper

Population Aging, Public Finances, and Alternatives for Retirement Reform
with Tim Dominik Maurer. Link to latest version.

Abstract: We 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.


Improving Welfare by Public Education

Link to draft

Policy and Technical Work

Drivers of Real Interest Rates in a Two-country, General-equilibrium, OLG Model
with Jesper Pedersen, Danmarks Nationalbank. Link to WP


Solving Overlapping Generations Models with Linked Bequest and Human Capital
with Tim Dominik Maurer. Code available on GitHub

Work in Progress

Redistribution in Public Pension Schemes: Evidence from Denmark
with Tim Dominik Maurer