The effect from Reform 97 on the high school graduation gender gap

Master's thesis in Economic analysisAbstract: In 1997, Reform 97 was introduced in the Norwegian school system. The reform made it mandatory for children to start school at the age of six instead of seven, resulting in expanding the primary school with one year, now lasting ten years instead of nine. Using Norwegian register data collected from Microdata, we investigate if the reform has had any effect on the high school graduation gender gap, focusing on whether males have been negatively affected compared to females. Using a difference-in-difference and binary logit regression, we investigate the effect from the reform on the gender gap. We find an increase in the gender gap after the reform was implemented, but after including several control variables to the regression analysis, our results show no significant effect from Reform 97. We conclude that there must be other factors explaining the increase in the gender gap.submittedVersio