Erik Plug

Economics of the Family

At CESifo, Erik Plug will work on several projects revolving around the economics of the family. One project, in collaboration with Petter Lundborg and Astrid Wurtz-Rasmussen, examines how children without siblings fare in school. For this purpose, they will exploit in vitro fertility treatment success as a natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of having siblings on the school outcomes of first-born children. With nationwide school surveys matched to administrative registers, they can consider a wide set of school outcomes including test scores in math and reading, several personality traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, and overall school wellbeing. Another project, in collaboration with Marieke Bos, Elin Molin, Erik Plug, Kasper Roszbach, and Paula Roth, examines whether and why children with parents in debt are more likely to be worse off themselves. With a focus on debt that turned bad, they will compare the relationship between the debt of adopted and biological parents and that of their adopted and own-birth children.

Erik Plug’s research portfolio spans labor economics, family economics, and the economics of education. Areas of particular interest include the intergenerational transmission of human capital, the economics of fertility, and gender and LGBTQ+ disparities in the labor market. His research has been published in the leading journals in economics including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Human Resources, and Journal of Public Economics. 

Erik Plug is Professor of Economics at the University of Amsterdam. He is a CESifo Research Network Fellow as well as a Research Fellow at Tinbergen Institute, IZA Bonn and UCLS Uppsala. He currently serves as an Associate Editor at the Economic Journal. Erik Plug has been the president of the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE) and European Society of Population Economics (ESPE). He holds a PhD in Economics as well as an MSc in Econometrics from the University of Amsterdam.