This paper studies the relationship between wage formation and the political colour of the government in an economy with centralized wage bargaining. Ideological, organizational and personal ties between the central trade union and the social democratic political party suggest that the trade...

The papers studies wage formation using panel data for a large sample of Norwegian municipalities covering the time period 1970— 1992. The main conclusions are the following. Regional manufacturing wages are negatively related to regional unemployment, but the effects of open as well as total...

Economic theory predicts that local labour market tightness affects local wage setting as well as individuals’ migration decisions. But how should we measure local labour market tightness? In this paper we show that the common practice of using the local rate of unemployment as the tightness...

A rich set of regional labour market variables is utilised to explain interregional migration in Norway. In particular, regional indicators of labour market pressure are computed from survey data in which respondents are asked to evaluate local job prospects in their resident municipality and...

The paper tests hysteresis effects in unemployment using aggregate and panel data for Norway. While tests using aggregate or county— specific time series do not reject the null of unit root hysteresis, the panel tests firmly reject the null. When a one—time structural break is incorporated,...

We utilise a rich set of regional labour market variables to explain regional variation in Norwegian manufacturing wages. In particular, regional indicators of labour market pressure are computed from survey data in which respondents are asked to evaluate local job prospects. We find that...

The paper tests whether or not the effects on sectoral wages of internal and external factors depend upon the sector’s relative wage position. The key hypothesis is that workers in low—wage sectors are more concerned with relative wages than workers in high wage sectors. To test the...

This paper proposes a new evaluation approach of the class of small-scale `hybrid' New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (NK-DSGE) models typically used in monetary policy and business cycle analysis. The novelty of our method is that the empirical assessment of the NK-DSGE model...

The paper investigates explanations for forecasting invariance to structural breaks. After highlighting the role of policy, we isolate possible structural invariance in a simplified dynamic macro model that nevertheless has features in common with the standard model of aggregate demand and...

As financial stability has gained focus in economic policymaking, the demand for analyses of financial stability and the consequences of economic policy has increased. Alternative macroeconomic models are available for policy analyses, and this paper evaluates the usefulness of some models from...