School quality is hard to define and measure. It is influenced by not only school expenditures, but also characteristics that are hard to measure like norms and peer effects among teachers and pupils. Furthermore, family background and community characteristics are important in explaining...

There is massive cross-sectional evidence that children of more educated parents outperform their schoolmates on tests, grade repetition and in educational attainment. However, evidence for causal interpretation of this association is weak. Within a rich census level data set for Norway, we...

Starting in the 1960s, considerable opposition to the Canadian and Norwegian harp seal hunt off Newfoundland developed. It was alleged that the seal hunt was unethical and that the seal population had been seriously depleted. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the production function for...

The relative performance between seasons in a fishery is tested empirically. In particular, the importance of a stochastic environment-what may be denoted as fishing luck in a fishery-is established by applying Dickey-Fuller unit-root tests for the efficiency scores of vessels between seasons....

Among policymakers, educators and economists there remains a strong, sometimes heated, debate on the extent to which good schools matter. This is seen, for instance, in the strong trend towards establishing accountability systems in education in many countries across the world. In this paper, in...

In every society for which we have data, people’s educational achievement is positively correlated with their parents’ education or with other indicators of their parents’ socioeconomic status. This topic is central in social science, and there is no doubt that research has intensified...

In this paper, we explore the impact of a mandatory education reform as well as pre-reform availability of schools above the mandatory level, on educational attainment and returns to education in Norway. We contribute to the existing literature by focusing on the heterogeneity of the impact of...

We use a population-based employer-employee dataset to analyze changes in job stability in Norway. We first present descriptive analyses of tenure and separation rates, followed by regression-adjusted measures controlling for changes in demographics and the business cycle. We see only weak...

Using matched worker/plant level data for Norway, theories explaining the change in skill composition are assessed using direct evidence on the job creation and destruction for high, medium and low skilled workers. Skill based job creation is analysed in detail for plants in a high-skill service...