期刊名称:Discussion Papers / Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration
印刷版ISSN:0804-6824
出版年度:2003
卷号:2003
出版社:Bergen
摘要: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, attitudes
and peer effects among teach ers and pupils. Furthermore, family background and
community characteristics are important in explaining educational outcomes. In this
paper we study the composite effect of primary schools and neighbourhoods on adult
educational attainment controlling for family characteristics. Instead of identifying the
effect of specific neighbourhood and school characteristics on educational attainment,
we focus on correlations in final years of schooling among neighbouring children and
school mates. We find a clear trend of declining influence of childhood location over
the 25 year period. Then we ask whether a change in the compulsory school law
extending the mandatory years of education from seven to nine years implemented by
municipalities over a ten year period, can explain the pattern of declining
neighbourhood effect. Although the neighbour correlations tend to be lower in
municipalities which introduced the school reform, we cannot conclude that the
primary school reform had a strong impact on the overall trend. Motivated by the fact
that neighbouring children typically go to the same school, we estimate school mate
correlations for children born in the 1960s. The overall impact of factors shared by
children who graduated from the same school at the age of 15/16 i s negligible. The
variation in ‘school quality’ and the impact of peers on final educational attainment
seem to have been very limited in Norway