Networks
Two research networks, one international and one around Copenhagen.
NBER International Social Security Project
ISS · 1999 to date · Twelve phases, twelve countries
Country teams take the same question about retirement and social security, each answering it on its own national data, and the answers are compared side by side. A phase opens with a question, runs two or three years of meetings, and closes with a volume published for the National Bureau of Economic Research by the University of Chicago Press. Jonathan Gruber and David A. Wise led the first phases; Axel Börsch-Supan and Courtney Coile lead the current ones.
I have written the Denmark chapter in every volume from the second, mostly with Nabanita Datta Gupta and Peder J. Pedersen, sometimes with Michael Jørgensen, and more recently with Malene Kallestrup-Lamb and Alexander O.K. Marin.
Copenhagen Education Network
CEN · 2014 to date · Thirty workshops, fourteen seminars
Economists of education mostly around the Copenhagen area meet two or three times a year. The host rotates between the member institutions, and each workshop is built around an invited keynote and a day of work from them. The series ran as a monthly single-paper seminar through 2014 and 2015 before the workshops took over.
The organisers are Birthe Larsen and Lisbeth La Cour at Copenhagen Business School, Mette Ejrnæs at the University of Copenhagen, Petra Thiemann and Jan Bietenbeck at Lund, Rasmus Landersø and Miriam Gensowski at the Rockwool Foundation, Vibeke Myrup Jensen and Paul Bingley at VIVE, and Simon Calmar Andersen and Maria Knoth Humlum at Aarhus.
I gave the first talk of the series, in May 2014, on joint work with Nicolai Kristensen, and have presented six times since, on work with Lorenzo Cappellari, Jens Dietrichson, Mette Friis-Hansen, Vibeke Myrup Jensen, Marco Ovidi, Sarah Sander, Matteo Sandi, Konstantinos Tatsiramos and Stéphanie Vincent Lyk-Jensen.
The two work differently. (Almost) Every phase of the International Social Security project ends in a published volume, which is what the phases are organised around. The Copenhagen Education Network publishes nothing of its own; its output is the meetings, where work in progress from the member institutions is discussed by people to try and help improve it.