Whether increasing resource use in schools has a positive effect on pupil performance has occupied governments, parents and researchers for decades. A main challenge when trying to answer this question is to separate the effects of school resources from the effects of pupils' family background,...

Despite important policy implications associated with the allocation of education resources, evidence on the effectiveness of school inputs remains inconclusive. In part, this is due to endogenous allocation; families sort themselves non-randomly into school districts and school districts...

There is massive cross-sectional evidence that children of more educated parents outperform their schoolmates on tests, grade repetition and in educational attainment. However, evidence for causal interpretation of this association is weak. Within a rich census level data set for Norway, we...

We investigate the effects of a large-scale Norwegian reform that provided extra teachers to 166 lower secondary schools with relatively high student-teacher ratios and low average grades. We exploit these two margins using a regression discontinuity setup and find that the reform reduced the...

The national Norwegian school reform of 1994, which gave statutory right to at least three years of upper secondary education, had a significant impact on educational attainment among immigrant youth. In particular, we find that the immigrant transition rate from compulsory schooling to...

This paper examines the impact of performance-related pay on wage differentials within firms. Our theoretical framework predicts that, compared to a fixed pay system, pay schemes based on individual effort increase within-firm wage inequality, while group-based bonuses have minor effects on wage...

This paper studies the distributions of literacy skills, education, and employment of immigrants and natives in three host countries: Canada, the United States, and Norway. For natives, we uncover remarkably stable relations between literacy skills, schooling, and employment across countries....

Using matched worker/plant level data for Norway, theories explaining the change in skill composition are assessed using direct evidence on the job creation and destruction for high, medium and low skilled workers. Skill based job creation is analysed in detail for plants in a high-skill service...

Older workers typically possess older vintages of skills than younger workers, and they may suffer more from technological change. Experienced workers may nevertheless have accumulated human capital making them suitable for adopting new technologies. On the other hand, to adjust to new...

This paper uses a unique data set with nearly career-long earnings histories to provide evidence on the returns to schooling in current and lifetime earnings. We use these results to assess the importance of life-cycle bias in earnings regressions using current earnings as a proxy for lifetime...