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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]

Evidence on teacher behavior is essential for the understanding of the performance of school systems. In this paper we utilize rich data to study the teachers' quit decision in Norway. We distinguish between decisions to move between public schools within school districts, to another school district in the same labor market region, across labor market regions, and whether to leave public schools. The results indicate that the quit propensity to all four destinations is negatively related to student performance. The result is qualitatively independent of whether student performance is measured by examination results or teacher graduation. (Contains 7 tables, 1 figure and 25 notes.)

This paper studies teacher mobility using matched employee-employer panel data from Norwegian primary and lower secondary schools. The Norwegian institutional setup with completely centralized wage setting for teachers is ideal to analyze the effect of non-pecuniary job attributes on quit decisions. We find that teachers tend to leave schools with high share of minority students and high share of students with special needs. In addition, the composition of teachers and the school size affect the propensity to quit. These results are robust across different econometric specifications and sub-samples.

Investigates school spending in Norway, using a disaggregated demand model augmented to include political factors. Disaggregates county governments' high-school spending to identify sources of variation in student/teacher ratio, nonwage spending per student, and student enrollment. Political strength holds down (construction) costs and allows for more student enrollment. (25 references) (MLH)

This paper analyzes whether schooling increases intelligence measured by intelligence quotient (IQ). We use a longitudinal dataset where the individuals have conducted IQ tests both at ages 10 and 20. We estimate the effect of schooling on IQ at age 20 conditional on IQ at age 10 and other measures of early cognitive ability to account for selection into noncompulsory schooling. Ordinary least squares estimates indicate that 1 year of schooling increases IQ by 2.9-3.5 points (about 0.2 SD deviations), and instrumental variables estimates are similar. (JEL I21, J24), I. INTRODUCTION An implicit assumption in the human capital literature is that education affects individuals' general and analytical skills, and not only achievements narrowly related to the curriculum. A general [...]

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]

Using panel data for Norwegian schools, we establish a two-equation supply and demand model for teachers with approved education. Taking into account nationally determined teacher pay and a strict teacher appointment rule, the data enable us to separately estimate supply and demand functions for certified teachers. The results clearly indicate that the student body composition, and in particular students belonging to ethnic minorities, influences both teacher supply and teacher demand. The implied negative relationship between excess demand for certified teachers and the share of minority students is likely to be important for teacher quality. Keywords: Teacher sorting; Teacher quality; School choice

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]

This paper compares union wage bargaining outcomes across different types of employers. Five different employer objectives are discussed: profit, welfare and output maximization, and two specifications of a Leviathan. The model shows that the ordering of the union wage level across employer types depends on the functional form of product demand. With constant elasticity of product demand wage tends to be lowest in the output maximization case, while with a linear product demand wage tends to be lowest under welfare maximization.