Discussion papers

Adjusting maternal mortality data for international comparisons. The case of vital registration systems

Recidivism studies differ with respect to samples, definitions and follow-up periods. While it is recognized that such differences hamper comparability, there is little systematic knowledge about how recidivism figures are affected.

Dynamic discrete-choice models have been an important tool in studies of state dependence in benefit receipt. An assumption of such models is that benefit receipt sequences follow a conditional Markov process.

Supporters of public disclosure of personal tax information point to its deterrent effect on tax evasion, but this effect has not been empirically explored.

Do market-orientated economies with relatively large cross-sectional levels of inequality have higher income mobility and therefore less permanent inequality? To answer this question, we introduce a formal representation of income mobility as an equalizer of permanent income.

Publicly announced GHG mitigation targets and emissions pricing strategies by individual governments may suffer from inherent commitment problems. When emission prices are perceived as short-lived, socially cost-effective upfront investment in climate technologies may be hampered.

Despite well-documented convergence during the later years of the 20th century, labor market attachment remains markedly higher for men than for women.

Using variation across geographical regions, a number of studies from the U.S. and other developed countries have found more deaths in economic upturns and less deaths in economic downturns. We use data from regions in Norway for 1977-2008 and find the same procyclical patterns.

Given an objective to exploit cross-sectional micro data to evaluate the distributional effects of tax policies over a time period, the practitioner of public economics will find that the relevant literature offers a wide variety of empirical approaches.

In 2004 Norwegian authorities announced a reform introducing dividend taxation for personal (but not corporate) owners to take effect starting in 2006. This change provided incentives to maximize dividends in 2004 and 2005, and to retain earnings in the following years.

When is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) more equal or better than another? This question has proven difficult to answer in situations where distribution functions intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker criteria than second-degree stochastic dominance.

This paper is concerned with the question of whether top income earners are permanently there or only temporarily receive the highest incomes.

An essential difference between the design of the Swedish and the US in-work tax credit systems relates to their functional forms.

This article studies how a firm fosters formal and informal interaction among its employees to create a collective identity and positively influence their effort.

This study focuses on the possible effect of gender equality and equity in the family on the transition to first, second and third births.

We study the life cycle of portfolio allocation following for 15 years a large random sample of Norwegian households using error-free data on all components of households' investments drawn from the Tax Registry.

The presence of children still tends to reinforce a traditional division of labour in couples in many countries.

The financial crisis has brought the interaction between housing prices and household borrowing into the limelight of economic policy debate.

This paper derives a criterion comparing prices versus tradable quantities in terms of expected welfare, given uncertainty, optimal policy and endogenous cost structure.

This paper provides new evidence on the role of non-market based (“command-and-control”) regulations in relation to innovations in environmental technologies.