One quick and brief question on specialist mages: Do they cast their school's spells one level higher as described in the 3e basic rules?

Both short and more elaborate answers welcome ;)

I certainly haven't noticed that behavior in IWD2, though it could be easily overlooked.

Btw, where does it say in the PHB that specialist wizards count as a level higher? All I see is that they get one extra spell of each level they can cast and a +2 on spellcraft checks related to their specialty.

Maybe I misunderstood the PHB or I mixed up specoialist mage spellcasting with the cleric's domain spellcasting. Beeing to lazy to check I'd be thankful for clarification :D

Some clerical domains in p&p have the effect of relevant spells being cast at one level higher an effect. Mostly the Good/Evil/Law/Chaos domains, though there are probably others with this effect. All domains have some special power associated with them. This is modelled in IWD2, though the particular effect of bonus casting level is not one of the powers given.

No arcane caster counts as a higher level for casting as a result of any specialization to my knowledge.

A speciallist mage gets one extra spell slot of each spell level from 1 to 9. Something that is from the 2. edition on which the games such as BG, BG2 and IWD have been based on