Discussion papers

The standard cost-of-living index hinges on the assumption that there is free trade. Applying it to situations where trade barriers are present yields biased results with respect to a true cost-of-living index.

This study analyses the relation between moving during childhood and four different outcomes later in life.

This paper is concerned with concepts – poverty, inequality, affluence, and polarization – that are typically treated in different literatures. Our aim here is to place them within a common framework and to identify the way in which different classes of income transfers contribute to different objectives.

We examine the potential causal effect of years of schooling on the use of public disability pensions by studying the extension of compulsory schooling introduced in Norway in the 1960s.

In absence of joint global action, many jurisdictions take unilateral steps to reduce carbon emissions, and the usual strategy is to restrict domestic demand for fossil fuels. The impact on global emissions of such demand side policies is found by accounting for carbon leakage, i.e. changes in emissions abroad induced by the domestic action

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of including the value of public health care, long-term care, education and childcare on estimates of income inequality and financial poverty in 23 European countries.

This study investigates whether biofuel policies or favourable taxation of electric cars should be employed to satisfy a green house gas emission target connected to private transport within the Norwegian economy.

Analyses of contact frequency between non-resident fathers and children are often based on samples of non-resident fathers or resident mothers only. It is well established that non-resident fathers tend to report more contact than the resident mothers do, but it is less clear whether it matters which parent we ask when the aim is to explore predictors of father-child contact.

In 1998 the Norwegian government introduced a program that substantially increased parents’ incentives to stay home with children under the age of three.

This paper shows how the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) methodology can be used to validate predictions from a discrete choice structural labor supply model. Practical guidance is given on how such comparisons can be carried out, and results of these two main methods of obtaining empirical response estimates are contrasted and interpreted.

In this study, we develop a method for decomposing the behavioral responses to increased energy efficiency based on a conditional demand model applied to a household production framework.

We deduce a model for using cross-sectional data for total annual electricity consumption for a sample of households, together with information from energy surveys, to estimate the end uses within an econometric demand model conditional on appliance ownership.

The public health care systems in the Nordic countries provide high quality care almost free of charge to all citizens. However, social inequalities in health persist.

This paper presents a new method for calculating Gini coefficients from tabulations of the mean income of social classes. Income distribution data from before the Industrial Revolution usually come in the form of such tabulations, called social tables.

In a non-renewable resource market with imperfect competition, the resource owners’ supply is governed both by current demand and by the resource rent.

We perform an empirical analysis of the extent to which ongoing technological change through R&D activity has offset the effect of ongoing depletion on the cost of finding additional reserves of oil in eight global regions.