Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen, Department of Economics Senior Research Fellow, has been awarded an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) New Investigator Grant for his project Beyond Identity: Understanding the Role of Sexuality in Shaping Lives and Wellbeing. The grant, worth £294,958, will run from summer 2025 to 2028.
The project uses unique Danish population-level data to examine how sexual identity shapes life trajectories, including wellbeing, labour market outcomes, and intergenerational mobility. By identifying same-sex cohabiting couples across the entire population over time, the research overcomes key limitations of existing survey-based studies and offers unprecedented insight into the lived experiences of sexual minorities.
The findings are expected to inform policymakers, employers, and LGBTQIA+ organisations, with the aim of improving wellbeing and reducing inequalities, while also contributing to broader economic understanding.
The first output from the grant is Mathias’ job market paper, Intergenerational Mobility by Sexuality, co-authored with Fane Groes and Morten Kjær Thomsen. The paper develops a population-scale approach to study how sexuality shapes opportunities in life using administrative data by identifying cohabiting partners through joint financial commitments.
Its strategy yields estimates of absolute and relative mobility by sexuality across a range of outcomes, including earnings, mental health, and family formation. They show that many differences in key life outcomes by sexuality persist across the parental distribution, significantly disadvantaging even sexual minority individuals who grow up at the top of the parental income distribution.
We look forward to following the progress of this research and to the insights it will generate over the course of the project.
