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This paper investigates the early working careers of graduates from teacher education using Norwegian register data. The longitudinal data follows the individuals up to 12 years after graduation. The analysis is on net attrition since mobility both out of and into teacher positions is taken into account. The findings reveal a gradual net attrition from teacher positions of about 1.3 percentage points yearly, starting 1-3 years after graduation. Some of the attrition is to leadership positions in education, but the main attrition is to jobs outside education. The attrition is mainly among males and graduates with relatively high measured academic ability, and it differs greatly across teacher education types. The differences in the probability of teaching related to gender and academic ability are low shortly after graduation, but increase over time. Teacher education graduates for secondary schooling work as teachers to the lowest degree. These systematic patterns are related to both the demand and supply side of the teacher labour market.

We study the effects of giving poor females the right to vote in local elections on education spending and teacher-student ratios. To estimate causal effects, we exploit a national voting reform in Norwegian local elections that removed socioeconomic restrictions on female voting rights. The identification strategy exploits heterogeneous changes in the share of females in the voting franchise from the pre-reform (1907) to the post-reform election (1910) across local governments. While US studies find positive effects on government spending of the introduction of female suffrage, we find no systematic effects on education spending, despite a significant increase in female turnout.

Teacher recruitment is a persistent challenge, particularly in small and rural communities. This paper examines the probability that newly qualified teachers enter a teaching position in their home region and a range of individual and regional factors. Using rich longitudinal data from Norwegian administrative registers, we find that several individual and local characteristics matter for the mobility of novice teachers. On average, entering teaching positions in the home region is most common for females, individuals with low-educated parents, and individuals with relatively low grade point averages from their academic studies. Moreover, the probability of entering a teaching position in the home region is positively associated with the region’s population, but independent of whether a teacher education institution is located in the home region. Overall, the results suggest that the types of teachers that are underrepresented in schools have the lowest attachment to the teaching profession and their home region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author estimates the causal effect of the wage level on the recruitment rate in establishments. During the 1990s, the wage setting for certified teachers in Norway was completely centralized, with a state-paid wage premium of about 10% at some schools with severe recruitment problems. The empirical approach exploits within-school variation in wage-premium eligibility and that actual teacher supply is empirically observed at schools with excess demand for teachers. In a difference-in-differences framework, the wage premium increases the recruitment rate by 6 to 7 percentage points. This finding is robust to model specification and indicates that the recruitment elasticity to the wage is equal to the separation elasticity in absolute terms. The implied short-run labor-supply elasticity for individual establishments is about 1.4. It is also evidence of a diminishing return to scale in recruitment activity, a central assumption in search-theoretic models of imperfect competition in the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local government mergers are an important policy issue in many countries, yet empirical evidence of the effects of merging and of local government size on the production and quality of local public services is scarce. We use the spatial and temporal variation in forced mergers between cities and their surrounding local governments in Norway to provide quasi‐experimental evidence of the effect on long‐run student outcomes. We find that the mergers increase students' educational attainment by about 0.1 years and income by about 4%, suggesting that mergers improve long‐run student outcomes through increased school productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article lists the referees who provided reports to the journal between October 1, 2015 and September 30, 2016 including Karsten Albaek, Niaz Asadullah and Rita Asplund.