The ongoing financial crisis is shaking central bankers’ certainties about their mission, and a rethinking of such mission can greatly benefit from a non-finalistic reassessment of how central banking has evolved over the centuries. This paper does so by taking a functional, instead of an...

Most theoretical central bank models use short horizons and focus on a single tradeoff. However, in reality, central banks play complex, long-horizon games and face more than one tradeoff. We account for these issues in a simple infinite-horizon game with a novel tradeoff: higher rates deter...

This paper finds that asset prices on Oslo Stock Exchange is the single most important block of data to improve estimates of current quarter GDP in Norway. Other important blocks of data are labor market data and industrial production indicators. We use an approximate dynamic factor model that...

Traditional studies of the Dutch disease do not account for productivity spillovers between the booming resource sector and other domestic sectors. We put forward a simple theory model that allows for such spillovers. We then identify and quantify these spillovers using a Bayesian Dynamic Factor...

We propose a new VAR identfication scheme that enables us to disentangle labor supply shocks from wage bargaining shocks. Identification is achieved by imposing robust signrestrictions that are derived from a New Keynesian model with endogenous labor force participation. According to our...

This paper bridges the new open economy factor augmented VAR (FAVAR) studies with the recent findings in the business cycle synchronization literature emphasizing the importance of regional factors. That is, we estimate and identify a three block FAVAR model with separate world, regional and...

This paper investigates how concentrated ownership of capital influences the pricing of risky assets in a production economy. The model is designed to approximate the skewed distribution of wealth and income in U.S. data. I show that concentrated ownership significantly magnifies the equity risk...

On the basis of data from the Historical Monetary Statistics-project by Norges Bank, the present paper serves a threefold purpose. In the first place it gives an overview of financial crisis in Norway from her independence from Denmark in 1814 till present times. Secondly, historical business...

Recent studies find that shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment are a main driver of business cycles. Yet, they struggle to explain why consumption co-moves with real variables such as investment and output, which is a typical feature of an empirically recognizable business cycle. In...

This paper investigates the responses of house prices and household credit to monetary policy shocks in Norway, using Bayesian structural VAR models. I find that the effect of a monetary policy shock on house prices is large, while the effect on household credit is muted. This is consistent with...