Dale T. Mortensen – a Niels Bohr professor at Aarhus University – was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2010 for his labour market research.

The higher the unemployment benefit, the longer the period of unemployment and the greater the number of unemployed. Nobel Laureate Dale T. Mortensen’s research shows there is a clear correlation between the amount of the unemployment benefit, the length of the period of unemployment and the number of people unemployed.
“Professor Mortensen’s theories indicate that we have to look at the actual behaviour of the individual before we can draw general conclusions at societal level. And our data have proved him right: a higher benefit makes the individual unemployed person more selective regarding the job – or salary – he or she is prepared to accept,” says Niels Westergård-Nielsen, professor of economics.

Economists at Aarhus University have worked closely with Professor Mortensen for three decades, and have provided crucial data for his research. The American professor has held a Niels Bohr visiting professorship at the Department of Economics and Business since 2006, and he spends between three and five months every year among students and researchers at Aarhus University. He is also a professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, USA.

Productive collaboration
Professor Mortensen is grateful for the help he has received from the Aarhus economists.
“Professor Mortensen was very impressed with the Danish data. We’ve simply been a world leader in this field, and he’s always remembered to refer to Aarhus University and our research in his own publications,” says Professor Westergård-Nielsen.
The researchers subsequently extended Professor Mortensen’s ideas on data about the individual being necessary for making valid models to also apply to companies. Since then, the economists have collected data about companies, which are thereby also treated as individual agents.
“In general, you can say that Professor Mortensen’s theories have shown that individual behaviour is crucial for the behaviour of society. And it’s actually been something of a paradigm shift compared with previous theories, where Marxist economists in particular set the agenda and claimed that it was the other way round,” Professor Westergård-Nielsen concludes.

Dale T. Mortensen was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2010 along with Christopher A. Pissarides and Peter A. Diamond.