Rental expenses in private kindergartens: Impact of organizational structure on rental expenses in private kindergartens

Abstract

Between 2019 and 2021, several major corporate groups within the kindergarten sector sold kindergarten properties to foreign private equity firms. As a result, affected kindergartens transitioned from property ownership to tenancy roles. This thesis aims to investigate the impact of organizational structure and ownership type on rental expenses within the private kindergarten sector in Norway. The data for this analysis originates from The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training (Utdanningsdirektoratet). The methods used in the paper include descriptive statistics and logistic regression. The results show that nonprofit kindergartens exhibit the lowest rental expenses and have the lowest probability of significantly above-average rental expenses, when controlled for at the municipality level. On the other hand, while kindergartens from the top five largest chains did not show signs of notably high rental expenses between 2017 and 2019, their rental expenses spiked during the period of 2020 to 2021.