Research

Working Papers

Hidden Costs of Teaching? The Effect of Student Teaching Placements on Teacher Career Development
Axel Norgren
This project studies how the placement of student teachers affects their probability of completing teacher education, obtaining employment post-graduation, and the type of school they begin their career in. Using Swedish administrative registers, I explore whether placement schools shape both selection into and outcomes within the teaching profession.

Deciphering the Reading Puzzle: Teacher Value Added across Reading Subskills
This project disentangles teacher contributions to different components of reading ability. Using student-level data from the Swedish educational technology platform LegiLexi, I apply value-added models to estimate teacher effectiveness for overall reading comprehension as well as its subcomponents — decoding, vocabulary, and listening comprehension. The findings reveal that teachers are substantially more consequential for decoding abilities than for language comprehension, and that teachers who are effective at improving decoding are largely distinct from those who improve vocabulary and listening.

Published

Seeking opportunity or socio-economic status? Housing and school choice in Sweden
Andersson, F., Mutgan, S., Norgren, A., Wennberg, K. (2025)
Urban Studies, 62(5), 367–386.
We examine all families in Sweden whose children approach primary school age and explore residential mobility across school catchment areas. Families appear to use the housing market as an instrument for school choice, moving to areas with higher-SES pupils and higher test scores — but schools themselves provide little additional value-added.

Beyond the silver bullet: unveiling multiple pathways to school turnaround
Arora-Jonsson, S., Demir, E., Norgren, A., Wennberg, K. (2024)
School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 1–36.
Using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) across 77 Swedish schools over 10 years, we identify necessary and sufficient conditions for school turnaround — highlighting its causally complex, context-dependent nature.

Dynamics of founding team diversity and venture outcomes: A simulation approach
Levesque, M., Wennberg, K., Sundriyal, V.K., Norgren, A. (2024)
Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 1–51.
We build a simulation model of how founding team diversity affects performance and disruption over time. Greater diversity increases the likelihood of high-performing ventures but also raises disruption risk — a double-edged sword.