I study how motivation shapes own and peers’ educational success. Using data from Project STAR, I find that academic motivation in early elementary school, as measured by a standardized psychological test, predicts contemporaneous and future test scores, high school GPA, and college-test...

In recent years, many countries have experienced a significant expansion of higher education enrolment. There is a particular interest among policy makers for further growth in STEM subjects, which could lead to larger classes in these fields. This study estimates the effect of class size on...

We report results from a large-scale, pre-registered randomized field experiment in 159 Norwegian schools over four years. The intervention includes students aged 7-9 and consists of pulling students from their regular mathematics classes into small, homogenous groups for mathematics instruction...

We study the effects of informal social interactions on academic achievement and behaviour using idiosyncratic variation in peer groups stemming from changes in bus routes across elementary, middle, and high school. Our results suggest that student interactions outside the classroom—especially...

We investigate minimum wage spillovers by exploiting the first-time introduction of a minimum wage within a quasi-experiment in a context with an extraordinary large bite: the German roofing industry. We find positive wage spillovers for medium-skilled workers with wages just above the minimum...

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...

We examine whether the sorting of differently achieving students into differently sized classes results in a regressive or compensatory pattern of class sizes for a sample of national school systems. Sorting effects are identified by subtracting the causal effect of class size on performance...

This paper considers a class of GMM estimators for general dynamic panel models, allowing for cross sectional dependence due to spatial lags and due to unspecified common shocks. We significantly expand the scope of the existing literature by allowing for endogenous spatial weight matrices,...

This paper investigates the long-run economic relationship between health care expenditure and income in the world using data on 167 countries over the period 1995-2012, collected from the World Bank data set. The analysis is carried using panel data methods that allow one to account for...

We investigate the potential for statistical forecasting of aggregate oil and gas investment on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). A unique and detailed dataset containing data from 109 different fields on the NCS between 1970 and 2015 was employed. A set of 1080 autoregressive distributed...