At the initial stage of this project, the project group consisted of Asbjørn Aaheim, Magnus Hatlebakk and the authors. The authors are grateful for the discussion with the other project participants at this stage. We also had very useful discussion with the marine researcher Sigurd Tjelmeland...

The developed countries can meet part of their Kyoto commitments by investing in emission-reducing projects in developing countries (the Clean Development Mechanism, CDM). Since the developing countries have so far not been willing to accept binding emission commitments, the CDM has been the...

This paper conducts Granger-causality tests on real per capita GDP and four types of air emissions (CO2, CO, SO2 and NOx) by using Norwegian data covering the period 1973-2003. The test results indicate that only unidirectional causal relationships exist between GDP and air emissions. For CO2...

This paper studies the effect of a CDM tree-planting project on carbon sequestration and urban and rural income distribution, taking economy-wide impacts into account. Carbon sequestration in agricultural soil is considered in addition to the carbon in the tree farm itself. The study points to...

Agenda 21 required countries to develop and regularly update a national set of indicators for sustainable development. Several countries now have such sets also including separate indicators for climate change. Some of these indicators typically report global concentration of green house gases...

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...