It is something of a puzzle that politicians around the world have chosen to give up power to independent central banks, thereby reducing their possibilities to fine-tune the economy. In this paper the determinants of central bank independence (CBI) reforms are studied using a new data set on...

The purpose of this paper is to implement theoretically, the empirical observation that the relative importance of fundamental versus technical analysis in the foreign exchange market depends on the planning horizon. For shorter planning horizons, more weight is placed on technical analysis,...

This paper analyzes the implications of social identity and self-categorization in the context of optimal redistributive income taxation. A two-type model is supplemented by an assumption that individuals select themselves into social categories, in which norms are formed and education effort...

This paper analyzes whether marginal taxation of labor and capital income might be useful second best instruments for internalizing the externalities caused by conspicuous housing consumption, when the government is unable to implement a first best corrective tax on housing wealth. The rationale...

This thesis consists of a summary and four self-contained papers. <p> Paper [I] Following the 1987 report by The World Commission on Environment and Development, the genuine saving has come to play a key role in the context of sustainable development, and the World Bank regularly publishes numbers...</p>

This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two papers address political economy and industrial organization aspects of agricultural policy, and the last two international aspects of environmental policy. Paper [1] explains Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies to farmers...

The thesis consists of a summary and four papers, concerned with food consumption, behavior associated with overconsumption of food and analysis of the economic policy reforms designed to improve health. <p> Paper [I] estimates a hedonic price model on breakfast cereal, crisp bread and potato...</p>

This paper concerns optimal taxation and public goods in an economic federation with decentralized leadership, where one lower level government is first mover also in the horizontal dimension. Under plausible assumptions, horizontal leadership reinforces the incentives created by decentralized...

Adaptation is omnipresent but people systematically fail to correctly anticipate the degree to which they adapt. This leads individuals to make inefficient intertemporal decisions. This paper concerns optimal income taxation to correct for such anticipation-biases in a framework where consumers...

This paper concerns optimal income taxation in a two-country OLG economy, where each country is characterized by asymmetric information between the government and the private sector, and where one of the countries outsources part of its production to the other. In the country whose firms...