About the project
The primary objective of this project is to improve our understanding of how people make schooling decisions, how these decisions affect subsequent outcomes and line up with the demand of labor markets, and finally how these decisions interact with the education system. The latter part will in particular increase our understanding of how to effectively and equitably supply schooling.
To do so we will build on the Norwegian registry data, combine these data with targeted surveys, combine experimental and non-experimental methods, and apply frontier statistical and econometric methods.
In the first part of the project we study the role of information, families and peers in preference formation how these affect education choices. We subsequently estimate the causal impact of these choices on educational trajectories, human capital accumulation and labor market outcomes.
The second part of the project builds on these elements to study the supply side of education. This includes methodological work that is necessary to extrapolate findings to other populations and policies. The public provision of schooling involves equity and efficiency trade-offs. The systematic investigation of treatment assignment from an explicit welfare point-of-view in this project makes these trade-offs explicit. A final important contribution of the project is the quantification of these trade-offs for current and counterfactual policies.
Financing
The project is funded by The research Council of Norway under the FRIHUMSAM Toppforsk program with NOK 17 million over a five year period, from December 1st 2018 to November 30th 2023.
