Workers’absenteeism due to illness represents a major concern in several countries. Absenteeism are however not very well understood in economics. This paper presents a model where absenteeism is understood in relation to health. Its main predictions are (i) intermediate welfare state...

Norwegian administrative data are used to evaluate the impact of a doubling of the threshold in the earnings test on the labour force activity. We find no impact on labour market participation, but positive effects on earnings. The effect increases with exposure to the reform and is stronger for...

Norwegian administrative data are used to evaluate the impact of a doubling of the threshold in the retirement earnings test. We find almost no impact on the extensive margin, but a positive effect on the intensive margin. This positive effect is uneven over the earnings distribution, and...

The welfare state is generally viewed as either providing redistribution from rich to poor or as providing publicly-financed insurance. Both views are incomplete. Welfare policies provide both insurance and redistribution in varying amounts, depending on the design of the policy. We explore the...

This paper exploits a Norwegian physician directed reform aimed to reduce sick-leave. Physicians were required to consider part-time sick-leave as the default treatment and – in the case of long lasting full-time sick-leave – to file a report documenting why the worker was unable to perform...

This paper compares the political support for a targeted and a universalistic welfare policy in a model in which incomes are stochastic (so that welfare policies have an insurance benefit) and unequal ex ante (so that welfare policies have a redistributive effect). With self-interested voting,...

I study to what extent voters are forward looking and how future income affects <p> the voting decision. Particularly, I estimate the effect of both transitory and permanent income on preferences for different parties using a panel data set from the Norwegian Election Study. To construct a proxy...</p>

Political economy models predict that the rich oppose redistribution, and hence vote for conservative parties. Although this seems to fit the data well, I show that this is not true when we control for unobservable characteristics. Using Norwegian survey data, I study to what extent voting is...

I study to what extent voters are forward looking and how future income affects the voting decision. Particularly, I estimate the effect of both transitory and permanent income on preferences for different parties using a panel data set from the Norwegian Election Study. To construct a proxy for...

No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...