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

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

Building conditions in Norwegian local governments : trends and determinants

In light of evidence of low levels of maintenance of public buildings, we investigate trends and determinants of public building conditions in Norwegian local governments. On average, the condition of Norwegian local public facilities have improved slightly in the period 2004 - 2016. Survey data suggest substantial fluctuations in building conditions and a negative relationship between building conditions in 2004 and 2016. A driver behind this result is high investments in local governments with poor building conditions in 2004. Further, we find no systematic relationship between the conditions in 2004 and maintenance expenditures in subsequent years. We conclude that if maintenance levels are too low, investment levels may be too high. Generally, our results hint at an unhealthy balance between maintenance spending and public spending. Finally, we find that both political and fiscal factors are important in explaining building conditions

Concerns among local government facility managers

Purpose: To investigate which concerns are most important for local government facility managers in Norway. Design: We analyze a survey dataset covering about 2/3 of all Norwegian local governments, using descriptive statistics techniques. Findings: The facility managers are most worried about weak fiscal conditions and lack of political priority of facility management. Almost all facility managers report concerns about these issues, and the responses do not vary much across local governments with different characteristics. There is also widespread concern, albeit less serious, about organizational structure and recuitment problems. Local governments with a decentralized facility management are more concerned about the organizational structure than those with a centralized structure, and low-population local governments are more concerned about recruitment problems than those with a high population. Finally, local governments that report that their public buildings are in good condition generally have fewer and less serious concerns, in line with what one could expect. Originality/value: The paper offers insights into which concerns that are most important among local government facility managers

How to Use One Instrument to Identify Two Elasticities

We show that an insight from taxation theory allows identification of both the supply and demand elasticities with only one instrument. Ramsey (1928) and subsequent models of taxation assume that a tax levied on the demand side only affects demand through the price after taxation. Econometrically, we show that this assumption functions as an additional exclusion restriction. Under the Ramsey Exclusion Restriction (RER) a tax reform can serve to simultaneously identify elasticities of supply and demand. We develop a TSLS estimator for both elasticities, a test to assess instrument strength and a test for the RER. Our result extends to a supply-demand system with J goods, and a setting with supply-side or non-linear taxes. Further, we show that key results in the sufficient statistics literature rely on the RER. One example is Harberger’s formula for the excess burden of a tax. We apply our method to the Norwegian labor market