In one of two sectors, there are labor quality pricing distortions in the sense that labor obtains the average rather than marginal product. This may be due to a failure on the part of employers to observe individual labor quality or due to an income redistributing union. Relatively low quality...

With the completion of the internal market many possibilities for the EU member states to protect their markets against imports are restricted or even eliminated. This gives, however, member states the incentive to use other policy instruments. This paper analyzes the effect of liberalizing...

We discuss the endogenous selection of a costly allocation mechanism in a pure exchange economy. The allocation mechanism is modeled as an abstract trade center exhibiting setup costs, access costs and linear transaction costs. Exactly one trade center has to be selected. We define Pareto...

Are product standards protectionism in disguise? This paper estimates the costs of non-compliance with U.S. product standards, using a new database on U.S. import refusals from 2002 to 2012. We find that import refusals significantly decrease exports to the United States. This trade reducing...

In 1988, an early retirement program (AFP) was introduced in Norway for the 66-years-old. Since then, AFP has gradually been extended and by now it covers workers aged 62-66. In this paper we employ a multinominal logit model to study the transition between states in the labour market. The model...

Models that allow for non-cooperative as well as cooperative behavior of families are estimated on data from Norway in 1993 and 1994. The husband is eligible for early retirement while the wife is not. The models aim at explaining labor supply behavior of married couples the first twelve months...

Data in econometrics are, as a rule, non-experimental and hence we have to use the same data set to select the model and also to estimate the parameters in the selected model.In standard applied econometrics practice, however, one reports zero bias and some variance of the (pretest) estimators...