School facilities and student achievements: evidence from the Timss

This paper studies the link between school facilities and student achievements in eight countries using data from the TIMSS 2003 database. OLS and propensity score matching is used to control for observable characteristics. Both methods indicate that poor school facilities may be negatively associated with student achievements, but the estimated coefficients are mainly insignificant. Significantly negative estimates are found in only three out of eight countries when using OLS. When using matching on propensity scores I only find significant coefficients in one of the countries.

School building conditions and student achievments: Norwegian evidence

This paper studies the effects from poor school building conditions on student achievements in Norwegian primary schools based on results from national tests in mathematics, English and Norwegian. The benchmark OLS results suggest a negative relationship, but the estimates are mostly insignificant. Further, a municipality fixed effects (MFE) and an instrumental variable approach (IV) is suggested as alternatives to OLS in order to battle potential endogeneity issues due to unobservable characteristics. The results from the OLS and IV procedures are mostly similar to the OLS results.

Do school building conditions matter for student achievements in Norway?

This paper analyzes the relationship between the condition school buildings and student achievement in primary schools in Norway and highlights the importance of estimation uncertainty when interpreting the empirical results. The findings indicate that the relationship between school building conditions and student achievements is for the most part statistically insignificant. However, this is more due to large estimation standard errors than small coefficients. Hence, even though I for the most part cannot reject a zero effect, I cannot reject a sizable effect either

Less fiscal oversight, more adjustment

In Norway, a reform in 2001 lifted budget and borrowing approval for local governments that comply with the balanced budget requirement (BBR). It was a concern that less fiscal oversight would lead to less fiscal discipline. A neglected effect however, was that the reform implicitly introduced sanctions for violating the BBR. In addition a register informing financial institutions about authorities in need of borrowing approval provides voters with reliable information about fiscal performance. We find evidence of stronger fiscal adjustment after the reform, in particular for local governments with past deficits that are at risk of being enrolled in the register. Moreover, an important finding is that this result also holds for local government with past deficits that do not end up in the register. Local governments with past surpluses are less affected by the reform, but there is some evidence in the direction of lower surpluses for this group.publishedVersio

One size fits all? Facility management in Norwegian local governments

Up to the mid-1990s almost all Norwegian local governments had a decentralized structure on their facility management. Over the following 15 years a swift centralization followed, and in 2010 roughly 85% of the local governments used a centralized structure. Centralization is in accordance with the recommendation from a government commission studying the topic, but the arguments are not unambiguous. This paper formulates a stylized model for the relationship between facility management and production of welfare services. The model suggests that it is not obvious that a centralized structure is superior for all local governments, but that this may depend on local factors. Consistent with the predictions from the stylized model, the empirical findings suggest that large local governments with a weak political leadership centralize their facility management, while small local governments with a strong political leadership prefer a decentralized structure

Optimal maintenance scheduling of local public purpose buildings

We formulate the maintenance scheduling decision as a dynamic optimization problem, subject to an accelerating decay. This approach offers a formal, yet intuitive, weighting of the trade-offs involved when deciding a maintenance schedule. The optimal maintenance schedule reflects the trade-off between the interest rate and the rate at which the decay accelerates. The prior reflects the alternative cost, since the money spent on maintenance could be saved and earn interests, while the latter reflects the cost of postponing maintenance. Importantly, it turns out that it is sub-optimal to have a cyclical maintenance schedule where the building is allowed to decay and then be intensively maintained before decaying again. Rather, local governments should focus the maintenance either early in the building’s life span and eventually let it decay towards replacement/abandonment or first let it decay to a target level and then keep it there until replacement/abandonment. Which of the two is optimal depends on the trade-off between the alternative cost and the cost of postponing maintenance

On the difficulties of evaluating the effect of school facility conditions on student outcomes

ABSTRACT This paper presents various empirical strategies used to analyze the effect from school facilities on student outcomes, and discusses strengths and weaknesses by the methods. A key challenge in studies of student outcomes is that outcomes are affected by many factors and that many of these factors are correlated with each other. Moreover, some factors are difficult to measure, and cannot be observed in data. Hence, it is difficult to avoid problems related to omitted variables bias and the estimated correlations can thus often not be interpreted as causal effects. It is important to be aware of how difficult it is to move on from a correlation to a causal effect. If researchers wrongfully draw causal inferences one risks misleading policy makers into allocating resources to the wrong factors.</jats:p