Cost-effectiveness analysis often plays an important role in prioritization among different types of public health expenditures. Cost-effectiveness is defined as the maximal health benefits for given expenditures on health care. With a private health sector as a supplement to the public sector,...

Primary care physicians have two roles: the healer and the gatekeeper. We show that, due to information asymmetries, they cannot be expected to fulfill the latter role. Better gatekeepers will be poorer healers; hence all patients, both truly sick and shirkers, will strictly prefer physicians...

Climate mitigation policy should be imposed over a long period, and spur development of new technologies in order to make stabilization of green house gas concentrations economically feasible. The government may announce current and future policy packages that stimulate current R&D in...

The appropriate way of quantifying how taxation of a firm's income and capital can distort its optimizing conditions is a recurring issue in the literature on optimal taxation. Exponential decay, although empirically contested, is almost ubiquitous. In the present paper a generalized framework...

While rent taxation in some theories is neutral, and the tax rate could not be set to one hundred percent to minimize the need for distortionary taxes, this does not occur in practice. An important reason for this is the transfer incentives that would result. Monitoring to prevent transfer...

In this paper the theory of rank-dependent expected utility (RDEU) is substituted for the theory of expected utility (EU) in a model of optimal provision of public goods. The substitution generalizes the Samuelson rule, previously modified to include deadweight loss and tax evasion loss.

In the present paper we examine the economic incentives to work for persons receiving benefits in Norway. We take into account how the tax- and benefit systems interact. For a large part of the population social security transfers ensure that the income if not working is far from zero. These...

We use structural estimation techniques to analyze labour supply effects of changes in economic incentives for individuals who have just finished vocational rehabilitation in Norway. The complicated and sometimes non-convex budget sets for this group are accounted for. Focus is also on the...