Long-Term Effects of Class Size

By Peter Fredriksson, Björn Öckert, Hessel Oosterbeek. Social Science Research Network, 2013

325 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper evaluates the long-term effects of class size in primary school. We use rich data from Sweden and exploit variation in class size created by a maximum class size rule. Smaller classes in the last three years of primary school (age 10 to 13) are beneficial for cognitive and non-cognitive ability at age 13, and improve achievement at age 16. Most importantly, we find that smaller classes have positive effects on completed education, wages, and earnings at age 27 to 42. The estimated wage effect is much larger than any imputed estimate of the wage effect, and is large enough to pass a cost-benefit test.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b62139903919ad41f61669a53bebe69428362164

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In Education

Citations in the corpus

Gender Differences in Education (2012, result): “Fredriksson et al (2011) show similar results from a natural experiment in Sweden where administrative rules create exogenous changes in class sizes.”
The Long-Term Consequences of Teacher Discretion in Grading of High-Stakes Tests (2016, background): “, 2002); class size (Krueger and Whitmore, 2001; Chetty et al., 2011a; Fredriksson et al., 2012); and teacher value added (Chetty et al.”
Behavioral Economics of Education (2015, background): “Krueger (2003) and Heinesen (2010) find substantial class size effects on educational achievement. ecently Fredriksson et al. (2013) documented persistent long-run effects of reduced class size in Sweden.”
Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Childhood Investments on Postsecondary Attainment and Degree Completion. NBER Working Paper No. 17533. (2011, unknown): “In addition, Fredriksson, Ockert, and Oosterbeek (2013) found positive long-term effects of reduced class size in grades 4 through 6 in Sweden on educational attainment and wages.”
Inference in Regression Discontinuity Designs with a Discrete Running Variable (2016, unknown): “…economics journals that follow this methodology include Oreopoulos (2006), Card et al. (2008), Urquiola and Verhoogen (2009), Martorell and McFarlin (2011), Fredriksson et al. (2013), Chetty et al. (2013), Clark and Royer (2013), and Hinnerich and Pettersson-Lidbom (2014), among many others.”
Does Money Matter in the Long Run? Effects of School Spending on Educational Attainment (2017, background): “…studies examine the long-run effects of school spending, several recent studies have examined the educational attainment effects of specific inputs to the education production function, such as class size and teacher quality (Dynarski et al., 2013b; Fredriksson et al., 2013; Chetty et al., 2013).”