The recent trend towards decentralization of European public sector wage determination relaxes some of the central administered wage setting mechanisms developed in the post‐WW2 period. This paper discusses teacher wage determination in Norway in 1905-39, a period with a highly decentralized...

This paper analyzes the effect of assigning homework on student achievement using data from 16 OECD countries that participated in TIMSS 2007. The model exploits withinstudent variation in homework across subjects in a sample of primary school students who have the same teacher in two related...

This paper uses teacher assessments at age 16 in Norwegian comprehensive schools to measure different types of skills. While we follow the literature and interpret test scores in Mathematics and Science as proxy for cognitive skills, we use a novel measure for another type of skills: Performance...

Using a panel of international student test scores 1980–2000 (PISA and TIMSS), panel fixed effects estimates suggest that government spending decentralization is conducive to student performance. The effect does not appear to be mediated through levels of educational spending.

This paper investigates whether gender gaps in student achievement are related to evaluation schemes. We exploit different evaluations at the end of compulsory education in Norway in a difference-in-difference framework. Compared to scores at anonymously evaluated central exit exams, girls get...

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 panel of international student test scores 1980 – 2000 (PISA and TIMSS), panel fixed effects estimates suggest that government spending decentralization is conducive to student performance. The effect does not appear to be mediated through levels of educational spending.

This paper utilizes information on cognitive ability at age ten and earnings information from age 20 to 65 to estimate the return to ability over the life-cycle. Cognitive ability measured at an early age is not influenced by the individual’s choices of schooling. We find that most of the...

Monopsonistic wage-setting power requires that the supply of labor directed toward individual establishments is upward sloping. This study utilizes institutional features to identify the supply curve. The elasticity of labor supply is estimated using data for the Norwegian teacher labor market...

This paper utilizes a Norwegian experiment with exogenous wage changes to study teachers' turnover decisions. Within a completely centralized wage setting system, teachers in schools with a high degree of teacher vacancies in the past got a wage premium of about 10 percent during the period...