Aggregation of tangible capital assets across vintages and decomposition of value aggregates into quantities and prices are considered. Focus is on both capital stock values and capital service values. If the definitions and ways of measuring prices and quantities are not conformable, a third...

Survival rates are widely used to compare quality of health care. In this paper we introduce post-illness employment as a supplemental indicator of successful treatment of serious diseases. Utilizing rich register based data on cancer patients we document substantial differences across Norwegian...

According to the present guidelines for fiscal policy, the use of oil revenues in the Norwegian economy should over time equal the expected real return on the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG). An important question is therefore how to measure the real return, taking into account that the...

The standard cost-of-living index hinges on the assumption that there is free trade. Applying it to situations where trade barriers are present yields biased results with respect to a true cost-of-living index. Import price indices are particularly vulnerable to this bias since many of the goods...

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...

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...