Decentralization of government with property tax financing is the standard recipe for public sector reform. Fiscal competition is assumed to stimulate efficiency and hold down the tax level. Property taxation offers additional incentives for efficiency. We study the incentive mechanisms involved...

Local redistribution policy creates incentives for welfare migration that may result in 'underprovision' or even a 'race to the bottom'. This paper evaluates the empirical importance of welfare competition. Our contribution is to separate between the policy decision and the actual welfare...

The current paper investigates to which extent students in higher education respond to financial incentives by adjusting their study behavior. Students in Norway who completed certain graduate study programs between 1991 and 1995 on stipulated time were entitled to a restitution (of...

By using data from 16 OECD countries who participated in TIMSS 2007, this paper analyzes the effect of assigning homework on student achievement. The identification rests on within-student variation in homework across subjects in a sample of students who have the same teacher in both mathematics...

Using a comprehensive administrative database we exploit independent quasiexperimental methods to estimate the effect of class size on student achievement in Norway. The first method is based on a maximum class size rule in the spirit Angrist and Lavy (1999). The second method exploits...

Most theories of voter behavior predict that electoral participation will be higher in elections where more is at stake. We test this prediction by studying how participation is affected by exogenous variation in local governments' financial flexibility to provide pork for their voters....