Teachers and student outcomes: evidence using Swedish data

Author: Christian Andersson, And

Summary of Dissertation series 2008:1

ANDERSSON, Christian. Teachers and Student Outcomes: Evidence using Swedish Data. Department of Economics, Uppsala University. Economic Studies 107. 154 pp. ISBN 978-91-85519-14-9.

This thesis consists of four self-contained essays.

Essay 1 analyzes how student achievement is affected by resource increases in the Swedish compulsory school, due to a special government grant that was enforced in the academic year of 2001/02. The analysis is based on register data that contains all students in compulsory schooling (ninth grade) between 1998 and 2005. The results show that socio-economic variables explain a great deal of the variation in student achievement. The study also shows that the increased resources have not had a statistically significant positive effect on the average student’s achievement. This conclusion holds true when different measures of student achievement are used. Increased resources have, however, improved student achievement for students with low educated parents. If teacher density is increased with 10 percent, students with low educated parents are expected to increase their grade point average ranking with about 0.4 percentile units.


Essay 2 (with N. Waldenström) finds that the share of non-certified teachers in Swedish compulsory public schools has grown considerably during the last decade, from 7.2 percent in 1995/96 to 17.2 percent in 2003/04. Moreover, comparisons between schools and municipalities indicate large and increasing differences in the share of non-certified teachers over time. In this paper, we study whether these patterns may be explained by restrictions in the supply of certified teachers. This is done using a temporary targeted governmental grant, aimed at increasing the personnel density in schools, as an exogenous teacher demand shock. Our results show that the introduction of the grant decreased the share of non-certified teachers more in areas characterized by relatively high unemployment rates among certified teachers, i.e., where teacher supply restrictions were relatively low. These findings, hence, suggest that teacher supply restrictions do indeed matter for the composition of the teaching staff.

Essay 3 (with N. Waldenström) examines how the teaching staff composition, with respect to certification, affects student achievement in compulsory Swedish schools. The share of non-certified teachers in compulsory schooling has increased dramatically during the last decade, starting a large debate about school quality. We apply an instrumental variable approach to estimate the causal effect of the percentage of non-certified teachers on student achievement. We find, in our preferred specification, that a one percentage point increase in the share of non-certified teachers, is expected to decrease the average student’s GDP ranking with about 0.6 units, a substantial effect considering the large differences in certification rate that do exist between schools and municipalities. The effect also appears to be stronger for students with highly educated parents.


Essay 4 (with P. Johansson) estimates the effects of early age tutoring on grades, educational attainment, earnings, early retirement and death. To this end, we use data on boarding home students in the 1940s. These students attended regular public schools that were situated close to boarding homes. At these boarding homes, students had daily scheduled time for doing their homework and a directress was employed to help with the students’ homework. The placement at the boarding homes was based on the distance to the nearest school and thus had no direct connection to students’ skills, which enables us to study the effects of the pedagogical stimuli at the boarding homes. We find that tutoring at an early age in life is important as a way of equalizing skills upon leaving school. However, at this time (1940–1950s) it did not change the social stratification.