A researcher's guide to the Swedish compulsory school reform

Helena Holmlund

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: When studying different types of returns to education, educational reforms are commonly used in the economics literature as a source of exogenous variation in education. The Swedish compulsory school reform is one example; the reform extended compulsory education throughout the country, in different municipalities at different points in time. Such variation across cohorts and regions can be used in a differences-in-differences framework, in order to estimate causal effects of education. This paper provides a guide to researchers who consider using the Swedish reform in an empirical analysis: I present a description and background of the reform, provide some baseline results, a reliability analysis of the reform coding, a discussion of whether the reform is a valid instrument, and comment on the interpretation of IV estimates of returns to schooling. The main conclusions are the following: i) a reliability analysis of the reform coding finds a lower bound reliability estimate of 0.66-0.91; ii) the reform indeed raised educational attainment, more so for boys than for girls, and iii) with careful consideration of region-specific trends, the reform can be considered a valid instrument for education.

Keywords: educational reform; instrumental variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2008-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/19382/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: A researcher’s guide to the Swedish compulsory school reform (2020)
Working Paper: A Researchers Guide to the Swedish Compulsory School Reform (2008)
Working Paper: A Researcher's Guide to the Swedish Compulsory School Reform (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:19382

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