Discussion papers

For natives, we uncover remarkably stable relations between literacy skills, schooling, and employment across countries. For immigrants, the relations differ strongly: whereas literacy skills form only a weak determinant of immigrant employment in the North American labor markets, in Norway literacy is much more important for immigrant than native employment.

Empirical examination of whether R&D subsidies to private firms crowd out private investments has been hampered by problems related to selection. A particular worry is that research intentions and the quality of current research ideas may be correlated with the likelihood of applying for and receiving subsidies.

Previous studies have identified an “immigrant paradox” in crime in which crime rates are highest among immigrants who are young when they arrive in the host country, even though social capital and integration in the labour market and social networks favour the young.

The underrepresentation of women in entrepreneurship is consistent over cultures and countries, and is even higher in Norway than in most other industrialised societies. In spite of a growing literature, the reasons for this pattern are still not well understood.

Standard theory of intertemporal choice predicts that people smooth out life-cycle changes in income by borrowing and saving, such that their standard of living in any given year depends more on lifetime income than on that year’s income.

Expected earnings are considered to influence individuals' choice of education. However, the presence of nonpecuniary attributes and the different choice set available to prospective students make identification of this relationship difficult.

This paper investigates if the Norwegian wealth tax imposes capital constraints on small privately held businesses. A panel of 31,428 Norwegian firms from 2005 to 2009 is used to estimate two models of capital constraints. The models are estimated using the Fixed Effects method

Using longitudinal register data, we first present updated descriptive statistics on the total population of same-sex registered partnerships and marriages formed 1993-2010.

This paper exploits discontinuous grade mixing rules in Norwegian junior high schools to estimate how classroom grade composition affects pupil achievement. Pupils in mixed grade classrooms are found to outperform pupils in single grade classrooms.

Standard economic theory provides clear guidance on the design of cost-efficient policy in the presence of imperfect markets and externalities. However, observed policies reveal extensive discrepancies between principles and practise.

Recent contributions have questioned whether biofuels policies actually lead to emissions reductions, and thus lower climate costs. In this paper we make two contributions to the literature.

We study interactions between a “policy bloc’s” emissions quota market and an offset market where emissions offsets can be purchased from a non-policy “fringe” of countries (such as for the CDM under the Kyoto Protocol). Policy-bloc firms are assumed to benefit from free quota allocations that are updated according to either past emissions or past outputs.