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Using that schools are in session during the school year and out of session during the summer, it is possible to isolate the effect of schooling on learning. This natural experiment situation can also be used to see whether schooling compensates for disadvantageous social backgrounds. Using a new sample of Swedish sixth grade pupils, results are that math skills are lost when pupils are not in school, pupils with non-Swedish parents learn relatively more during the school year, and learning is unrelated to pupils' parents' socioeconomic level during both the summer and the school year.

I estimate the effect of class size on scholastic achievement using that schools are only in session during the school year and out of session during the summer. This seasonal feature of the schooling system makes it possible to control for unobservable pupil characteristics affecting both the level and change in achievement. Using Swedish data, I find that smaller classes generate higher achievement. A comparison with the results from applying the same data to the widely used value-added model is also made.

This paper evaluates school choice at the compulsory-school level by assessing a reform implemented in Sweden in 1992, which opened up for publicly funded but privately operated schools. In many local school markets, this reform led to a significant increase in the quantity of such schools as well as in the share of pupils attending them. We estimate the impact of this increase in private enrolment on the average achievement of all pupils using within-municipality variation over time, and controlling for differential pre-reform municipality trends. We find that an increase in the private-school share by 10 percentage points increases average pupil achievement by almost 1 percentile rank point. We show that this total effect can be interpreted as the sum of a private-school attendance effect and a competition effect. The former effect, which is identified using variation in school choice among siblings, is found to be only a small part of the total effect. This suggests that the main part of the achievement effect is due to more competition in the school sector, forcing schools to improve their quality. We use grade point average as outcome variable. A comparison with test data suggests that our results are not driven by differential grade-setting standards in private and public schools. We further find that more competition from private schools increases school costs. There is also some evidence of sorting of pupils along socioeconomic and ethnic lines.

We estimate effects on educational outcomes from the expansion of the independent school sector in Sweden, which followed as a consequence of the radical 1992 voucher reform. Using variation in this expansion across municipalities, we find that an increase in the share of independent school students improves average short‐ and long‐run outcomes, explained primarily by external effects (e.g. school competition). For most outcomes, we observe significant effects first a decade after the reform. By using regional level TIMSS data, we can reconcile our results with the negative national trend for Swedish students in international achievement tests.

We estimate long-run intergenerational persistence in human capital using information on outcomes for the extended family: the dynasty. A dataset including the entire Swedish population, linking four generations, allows us to identify parents' siblings and cousins, their spouses, and spouses' siblings. Using various human capital measures, we show that traditional parent-child estimates underestimate long-run intergenerational persistence by at least one-third. By adding outcomes for more distant ancestors, we show that almost all of the persistence is captured by the parental generation. Data on adoptees show that at least one- third of long-term persistence is attributed to environmental factors. (JEL I24, I26, J12, J24, J62)