Upper secondary education and labour market outcomes

The aim of the project is to evaluate how regional differences in the access to different types of upper secondary school programmes affected wages and employment for individuals who attended upper secondary school during the 1970s and 1980s.

The analysis is based on a differences-in-differences analysis, where the variation in the supply of upper secondary school programmes over time and within local school regions is studied. The results are compared to results from previous studies that investigated the same issue with a different method (so-called Regression Discontinuity analysis). Comparing if, and if so, how, the results differ, can provide information about the type of effects that are captured by different methods.

The study is based on register-based data on all individuals who attended upper secondary school in Sweden during the 1970s and 1980s. The data includes information on which upper secondary school they attended and adult labour market outcomes, such as wages and employment. Information about the local supply of upper secondary school education is retrieved from the National Archives.