Equality of opportunity has been one of the central ideas governing education policy in the Nordic welfare state. This paper takes its starting point in the shared history of educational reform in the Nordic countries, and presents evidence that the comprehensive school reforms that implied a...

This paper studies the evolution of school segregation in Sweden in the aftermath of the 1992 universal school voucher reform, which spurred the establishment of new independent voucher schools and introduced parental choice. The empirical analysis assesses the relative importance of...

This paper studies the effects of school organisation on short- and long-run pupil outcomes, exploiting a policy change that reorganised Swedish middle school education. The reorganisation induced pupils to remain in small local schools throughout grades 1-9, as opposed to making a transition to...

We evaluate the "Boost for Reading", an in-service training program for teachers aimed at improving the teaching of literacy and boosting students' reading and writing proficiency. The program provides research summaries about teaching strategies as a basis for group-based discussion, lesson...

We investigate whether exposure to immigrant peers at school affects natives' future interactions with ethnic minorities. Identification is based on variation in immigrant exposure across cohorts within school catchment areas in Sweden. We document that natives respond to immigrants by changing...

Although geographical and temporal variations in gender achievement gaps have received considerable attention, the role of culture in explaining this variation is not well understood. We exploit a large Swedish administrative data set to study gender gaps in education among second-generation...