The Norwegian productivity puzzle is rooted in three seemingly contradictory “facts”: First, Norway is one of the most productive OECD countries. Second, Norway has experienced high growth in productivity. Third, Norway has a relatively low level of R&D intensity. In this article, I show...

Aggregation of international prices in empirical work is generally based on well known index number formulas. However, a common practice applying such formulas is the use of price indices rather than price levels for which data across countries are rarely available. Numerical calculations of...

Previous studies on the relationship between exchange rates and traded goods prices typically find evidence of incomplete pass-through, usually explained by pricing-to-market behaviour. Although economic theory predicts that incomplete pass-through may also be linked to presence of non-tariff...

This paper discusses the construction and computation of a quality adjusted price index when the commodities are differentiated products, such as different brands of automobiles and refrigerators. The method we focus on is an extension of Trajtenberg’s approach. A key result obtained in the...

We examine estimation of a model of producer behavior in the presence of correlated measurement errors in the regressors. Scale economies and price-cost margins are estimated from a set of panel data for manufacturing plants. The paper presents a somewhat new model for estimation of these...

The paper uses elementary consumer theory to propose an inflation independent ratio definition of the substitution bias of the Laspeyres consumer price index, and derives an approximate substitution bias which depends on the size of the price change as measured by a norm in the Laspeyres plane...

An applied econometric study of aggregation, based on an unbalanced panel data set for manu-facturing plants is presented. Panel data are informative in examining aggregation of variables, parameters, and relationships empirically since they (i) allow estimation at both the micro and the macro...

The question of whether the housing market is efficient or not is posed by an increasing number of economists, policymakers, current homeowners and prospective homebuyers. This article tests the efficiency hypothesis on data from the Norwegian housing market in its capital, Oslo. We employ the...

The paper presents a method for computing the curvature implicit in the use of superlative price indices. It extends the quadratic lemma and allows us to compute the elasticity of substitution of the underlying preferences in the direction of the observed price change for the Törnqvist and the...

This paper discusses the properties of price- and Cost-of-Living indexes that follow from specific assumptions about the structure of consumer preferences. Of particular interest are indexes for elementary aggregates. In the first part of the paper we show how particular indexes for elementary...