Discussion papers

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.

While long total work hours (paid plus unpaid work) have usually been framed as a problem for employed women, researchers now ask whether more involved fathering practices imply a double burden for men, too.

Italy and Norway are characterized by different household patterns of young adults, with young Italians being more likely to live in their parents' house and young Norwegians more likely to live independently, alone or in multi-occupant households.

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.