This paper analyses quantitative evidence on the performance of for-profit schools in Sweden. It finds that school competition improved educational attainment and conditions for teachers. The benefits of competition were enhanced by the high number of for-profit schools that were established.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractDeclining fertility rates and increasing life expectancy necessitate a higher labor participation rate among older people in order to sustain pension systems and boost economic growth. At the same time, researchers have only recently begun to pay attention to the health effects of a longer working life, with rather mixed results thus far. Utilizing panel data from eleven European countries, and two distinct identification strategies to deal with endogeneity, we provide new evidence of the health effects of retirement. In contrast to prior research, we analyze both the impact of being retired and the effect of spending longer time in retirement. Using spouses' characteristics as instruments, while taking precautions to ensure validity, we find a robust, negative impact of being retired and spending longer time in retirement on selfassessed, general, mental and physical health. In addition, we show that the impact on selfassessed health remains similar in models using instruments from previous research while also including individual-and time-fixed effects to remove time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity between individuals as well as common health shocks. Overall, the results suggest that this innovation and the fact that we take lagged effects into account explain the differences in comparison to prior multi-country research using these instruments. While the short-term health impact of retirement in Europe remains uncertain, the medium-to long-term effects appear to be negative and economically large.

In recent decades, privatisation has become a mainstream policy option considered by politicians worldwide to improve the quality of schooling. This paper discusses the theoretical reasoning underlying the links between privatisation and education quality/productivity, and evaluates the empirical research. For privatisation to function well, it is crucial that the right competitive incentives exist, which in turn requires specific system design. While the cross‐national literature consistently indicates positive long‐term effects of private provision, the within‐country literature is more mixed (although there is very little evidence of negative effects). Yet it is important to note the significant flaws in the system design of many privatisation initiatives, which have unsurprisingly ensured that the effects of these initiatives thus far have been small or moderate at best. Flawed privatisations are unlikely to yield very strong gains. The policy implication is that politicians must pay careful attention to system design when privatising their education systems.