In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of political power on the provision of public education. We use data from a historical nondemocratic society with a weighted voting system where eligible voters received votes in proportion to their taxable income and without any limit on the maximum...

In this paper, we analyze how a weighted voting system introduced in 1862, which shifted the distribution of political power from landowners to industrialists at local town meetings, affected investments in local public education. We use an event study design based on a newly constructed panel...

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...

We study how the duration of paid parental leave affects the accumulation of cognitive skills among children. We use a reform which extended parental leave benefits from 12 to 15 months for Swedish children born after August 1988 to evaluate the effects of prolonged parental leave on...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of externalities from education in Sweden in an earnings equation framework. The empirical models are estimated on a large sample of matched employees and establishments. External effects of education are identified from the average educational...

Mixed-aged classes (MA-classes) are a common phenomenon around the world. In Sweden, these types of classes increased rapidly during the 1980:s and 1990:s. But the scientific evidence of the benefits of MA-classes is not convincing. In this paper, we estimate the effect of attending an MA-class...

This paper uses newly available Chinese micro data to estimate the return to college education for late 20th century China when allowing for heterogeneous returns among individuals selecting into schooling based on these differences. We use recently developed semiparametric methods to identify...

This paper develops two methods for estimating the effect of schooling on achievement test scores that control for endogeneity of schooling by postulating that both schooling and test scores are generated by a common unobserved latent ability. These methods are applied to data on schooling and...

Girls typically have higher grades than boys in school and recent research suggests that part of this gender difference may be due to discrimination of boys. We rigorously test this in a field experiment where a random sample of the same tests in the Swedish language is subject to blind and...