Using rich administrative data from Norway, we evaluate a 1998 work-encouraging reform targeted at single parents. We especially focus on educational performance for children of the involved single mothers. For all children of single mothers, the effect on school grades at completion of junior...

We exploit supply-driven heterogeneity in the expansion of cable television across Norwegian municipalities to identify developmental effects of commercial television exposure during childhood. We find that higher exposure to commercial television reduces cognitive ability and high school...

In 30% of young American couples the wife is more educated than the husband. Those women are characterized by a substantially higher employment (all else equal), which in turn amplifies income inequality across couples. Using NLSY79, we formulate and structurally estimate a dynamic life-cycle...

We extend the standard intergenerational mobility literature by modelling individual outcomes as a function of the whole history of parental income, using data from Norway. We find that, conditional on permanent income, education is maximized when income is balanced between the early childhood...

Instruction time varies among schools, subjects, pupils and grades. This variation is positively associated with test scores and has been used to identify modest positive causal effects for instruction hours in certain grades. We exploit administrative data on delivered and timetabled...

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,...

Research suggests that teenage childbearing adversely affects both the outcomes of the mothers as well as those of their children. We know that low-educated women are more likely to have a teenage birth, but does this imply that policies that increase educational attainment reduce early...

A variety of public campaigns, including the "Just Say No" campaign of the 1980s and 1990s that encouraged teenagers to "Just Say No to Drugs", are based on the premise that teenagers are very susceptible to peer influences. Despite this, very little is known about the effect of school peers on...