Two districts of Oslo started to offer five-year-old children free preschool four hours a day. We analyze the effect of this intervention on the school performance of the children from immigrant families 10 years later (age 16). Our difference-in-difference approach takes advantage of the...

Theory and evidence points towards particularly positive effects of high-quality child care for disadvantaged children. At the same time, disadvantaged families often sort out of existing programs. To counter differences in learning outcomes between children from different socioeconomic...

Proficiency in the language spoken by the majority population may be crucial for the cognitive development of children from immigrant families. High-quality child care is believed to promote such language skills, and it is thus of concern that children from immigrant families are...

This paper assesses the relationship between cash transfers to families and subsequent childbearing. We take advantage of a cash-for-care (CFC) policy introduced in Norway in 1998, and compare the fertility behaviour of eligible and ineligible mothers over a four year period. Contrary to...

Young children are thought to be vulnerable to separation from the primary caregiver/s. This raises concern about whether early child care enrollment may harm children's development. We use child care assignment lotteries to estimate the effect of child care starting age on early cognitive...

We estimate effects of child care center staff composition on early child development. During the years our data covers, child care centers in Oslo were oversubscribed, and child care slots were allocated through a lottery. This allow us to explore how staff education, experience and stability,...

Encouraging effects from random assignments of intensive and high-quality early child care to disadvantaged children have spurred hopes that publicly funded universal child care can improve human development and social mobility. However, in a universal system advantaged parents can improve the...

Persistently high workload may raise sickness absence with associated costs to firms and society. We proxy workload by the number of adults per child in Norwegian child care centers, but do not find that centers with many adults per child have lower sickness absence than other centers. However,...

Long paternity leaves have the potential for lasting effects on parental unions, potentially reducing specialization and increasing union stability and fertility. We put these hypotheses to a causal test, using an extension of the Norwegian parental leave father's quota from 6 to 10 weeks as a...

The formation of peer groups with social norms for private contributions to a public good is analyzed in an n-player two stage game. First people choose a peer group, then they choose whether to contribute. The first choice is made through a learning process represented by evolutionary dynamics,...