Resources and student achievement - evidence from a Swedish policy reform

This paper utilizes a policy change to estimate the effect of teacher density on student performance. We find that an increase in teacher density has a positive effect on student achievement. The baseline estimate – obtained by using the grade point average as the outcome variable – implies that resource increases corresponding to the class-size reduction in the STAR-experiment (i.e., a reduction of 7 students) improves performance by 2.6 percentile ranks (or 0.08 standard deviations). When we use test score data for men, potentially a more objective measure of student performance, the effect of resources appears to be twice the size of the baseline estimate.

Keywords: Student performance, teacher/student ratio, policy reform, differences-in-differences
JEL-codes: I21, I28, J24