This paper studies gender differences in performance in university entrance examinations. We exploit data from the exams that the nine Finnish universities providing education in economics and business use to choose their students. These exams are multiple choice tests where wrong answers are...

This paper studies the relationship between the timing of tracking of pupils into vocational and academic secondary education and gender differences in educational attainment and income. We argue that in a system that streams students into vocational and academic tracks relatively late (age...

This paper surveys the trends in gender gaps in education, their causes and potential policy implications. I show that female educational attainment has surpassed, or is about to surpass, male educational attainment in most industrialized countries. These gaps reflect male overrepresentation...

This paper examines the effects of performance pay on earnings using linked employee-employer panel data from Finland. These payroll data contain information on the exact share of earnings obtained and hours worked on a performance pay contract. Using these data, we estimate the effects of...

Many authors have recently suggested that the heterogeneity in the quality of early education may be one of the key mechanisms underlying the intergenerational persistence of earnings. This paper estimates the effect of a major educational reform on the intergenerational income mobility in...

The Finnish comprehensive school reform replaced the old two-track school system with a uniform nine-year comprehensive school and significantly reduced the degree of heterogeneity in the Finnish primary and secondary education. We estimate the effect of this reform on the test scores in the...

This paper documents trends in social mobility in Norway starting from fathers born at the turn of the 20th century and ending with sons born in the 1970s. We measure social mobility with intergenerational income elasticities, associations between fathers' and sons' income percentiles, and...

We study the effect of post-compulsory education on crime by exploiting a regression discontinuity design generated by admission cut-offs to upper secondary schools in Finland. We combine data on school applications with data on criminal convictions and follow individuals for 10 years. Our...