Using registry data on every employed Norwegian woman giving birth to her first child during the period 1995–2008, we describe patterns of certified and paid sick leave before, during and after pregnancy. By following the same women over time, we can explore how observed sick leave patterns...

While child welfare services of high quality are very important for many children, measuring quality is not a simple task. This paper presents a method for estimating differences in the quality of local child welfare services. We identify the contributions of municipalities to high school...

This paper studies how changes in welfare benefit levels affect welfare recipients’ residential choices. Although several empirical studies have stressed that welfare policy may affect residential choices of welfare recipients, few studies have simultaneously taken into account that...

More educated parents are observed to have better educated children. From a policy point of view, however, it is important to distinguish between causation and selection. Researchers trying to control for unobserved ability have found conflicting results: in most cases, they have found a strong...

This paper examines panel data modelling with latent variables in analyzing log-linear relations between inputs and output of firms. Our particular focus is on (i) the "increasing returns to scale puzzle" for labour input and (ii) the GMM estimation in the context of errors-in-variables and...

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...

Several studies, conducted on U.S. data, have found rather strong income responses to changes in marginal tax rates, when treating tax reforms as "natural experiments" and applying the differences-of-differences estimator on individual income data. The Norwegian tax reform of 1992 implied...

We evaluate consequences of some important assumptions ofthe perpetual inventory method of capital stock calculation under geometric depreciation. The data are plant-level panel data from the Norwegian manufacturing statistics, containing independent measures of capital stocks and gross...

Galí, Gertler and Lòpez-Salido (2005), GGL, assert that the hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curve, NPC, is robust to different choices of estimation procedure and so some forms of specification bias. Specifically, the dominance of forward-looking behavior is robust according to GGL. We assess...

This paper discusses identification, estimation and testing in panel data models with attrition. We focus on a situation which often occurs in the analysis of firms: Attrition (exit) is endogenous and depends on the outcomes of an observed stochastic process and the interest-parameters...