School building conditions and student achievments: Norwegian evidence

Abstract

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.