Education and Mobility *We show that the length of compulsory education has a causal impact on regional labour mobility. The analysis is based on a quasi-exogenous staged Norwegian school reform, and register data on the whole population. Based on the results, we conclude that part of the USEurope difference, as well as the European North-South difference in labour mobility, is likely to be due to differences in levels of education in the respective regions. JEL Classification:I28, J24, J61

This article considers methods for decomposing wage variation into individual and group specific components. We discuss the merits of these methods, which are applicable to variance decomposition problems generally. The relative magnitudes of the measures depend on the underlying variances and covariances, and we discuss how to interpret them, and how they might relate to structural parameters of interest. We show that a clear-cut division of variation into area and individual components is impossible. An empirical application to the British labour market demonstrates that labour market area effects contribute very little to the overall variation of wages in Britain.

It is possible that human capital produces positive externalities to the society indirectly, through non-market channels such as health or crime. Another such channel could be the effect of education on the functioning of democratic decision-making. Measures of the functioning of democracy are bound to be controversial, but one such measure -voter turnout -reflects the engagement of people to democracy, and also receives a considerable amount of attention from social scientists as well as the media.A vast body of empirical research supports the conclusion that educated people have a higher tendency to vote in political elections. However, since the level of education is not assigned randomly, but is a conscious choice, the possibility remains that both education and political participation are determined by unobserved personal qualities or parental influences. So far few studies have been able to find and utilise an institutional change that would have produced experimental variation in the amount of schooling across individuals or groups of people and match it to data on voter turnout or other variables of civic engagement. The few recent studies that attempt this, end up with partly conflicting results.This study estimates the effect of education on voter turnout in the long run. It contributes to the empirical evidence based on institutional changes by using the timing of a Norwegian staged school reform as an instrumental variable for education. In contrast to previous studies, the Norwegian reform created relatively large individual level variation in the years of schooling at lower levels of attainment, as the minimum number of compulsory years was raised from seven to nine. The timing of the reform varied across Norway in a scattered fashion, and this variation appears to be quasirandom as it is difficult to find socio-economic correlates for it.To provide a robust view of the effects of the reform, the analysis is carried out at two levels.Firstly, by using survey data, the impact of the reform on voting in parliamentary elections is tested using individual level data two to four decades after the reform. To the extent that the survey responses can be trusted, this provides an ideal setting for the evaluation of the impact of education on voting. Since some assumptions regarding accuracy of the survey data cannot be fully tested, the analysis is also carried out at the municipality level, using data from up to two decades after the reform started. Municipality level turnout data is representative and accurately measured and also caters for potential behavioural externalities in voting behaviour.

Computers and ICT have changed the way we live and work. The latest Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2004 provides a snapshot of how using ICT has revolutionized the workplace. Various studies have suggested that the use of a computer at work boosted earnings by as much as 20 per cent. Others suggest this reported impact is due to unobserved heterogeneity. Using excellent data from the WERS employer-employee matched sample, we compare ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates with those from alternative estimation methods and those which include controls for workplace and occupation interactions. We show that OLS estimates overstate the return to computer use but that including occupation and workplace controls, reduces the return to around 3 per cent. We explore the return on different IT skills and find a small return to the use of the 'office IT function' and the intensity of computer use as measured by the number of tasks a computer is used for. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2008.