Housing conditions and children's school results: evidence from Norwegian register data

In this article, we investigate the extent to which housing conditions are associated with school results for children living in Norway. We link individual exam results of students from three national exams in the 5th, 8th and 10th grades for all children living in Norway in the years 2015–2017, to a number of official national datasets including a novel housing register that has information on key housing characteristics for all households in Norway. We also use a newly released noise register, which estimates noise exposure for every address in Norway. Our results show that living in a crowded home, in rented accommodation, being exposed to high levels of noise and residential mobility is associated with poorer exam results. This negative correlation is stronger for older children. However, further testing suggests that we can no longer rule out that the negative association between renting and overcrowding is driven by unobserved cofounders. Residential mobility and noise pollution, on the other hand, remain negative even after controlling for omitted variable bias.