With an aging population, the demand for care along with increasing health-care expenditures place an increasing burden on public finances. Informal care may substitute and complement publicly provided formal care (Bolin et al., 2008;Bonsang, 2009;Van Houtven & Norton, 2004). Therefore, informal caregivers constitute a critical national resource. Even in Norway-a country with a large public sector and one of the highest spending levels on publicly provided eldercare in Europe (Huseby & Paulsen, 2009)-the amount of man hours of informal care provided is estimated to be of the same magnitude as that of publicly provided formal care (Berge et al., 2014). Nevertheless, informal care may come at a cost for caregivers; care responsibilities can be a stressor as they often come in addition to other obligations such as work or household chores, or they can have

This paper provides new evidence that preventive health care services delivered at schools and provided at a relatively low cost have positive and lasting impacts. We use variation from a 1999-reform in Norway that induced substantial differences in the availability of health professionals across municipalities and cohorts. In municipalities with one fewer school nurse per 1,000 school-age children before the reform there was an increase in the availability of nurses of 35% from the pre-to the post-reform period, attributed to the policy change. The reform reduced teenage pregnancies and increased college attendance for girls. It also reduced the take-up of welfare benefits by ages 26 and 30 and increased the planned use of primary and specialist health care services at ages 25-35, without impacts on emergency room admissions. The reform also improved the health of newborns of affected new mothers and reduced the likelihood of miscarriages.

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