Generational conflict affects the supply of public welfare services, and the rising share of elderly is seen as a threat to educational spending. We offer an analysis of spending in child care, primary and lower secondary education, and care for the elderly related to the size of young and old...

Generational conflict affects the supply of public welfare services, and the rising share of elderly is seen as a threat to educational spending. We offer an analysis of spending in child care, primary and lower secondary education, and care for the elderly related to the size of young and old...

The tax structure is important for the income distribution and therefore a key playground for redistributive politics. The standard theory assumes that more unequal income distribution will create a majority for more redistribution (Meltzer and Richard). This study investigates the empirical...

The paper investigates the relationships between costs and user charges in the sewage industry in Norwegian local governments. The purpose of the analysis is to answer the following questions: (i) To what extent is a higher unit cost passed on to consumers in terms of a higher user charge? (ii)...

Recent theoretical research suggests that property taxation has incentive effects that can help control cost problems in the public sector. The institutional setting in Norway allows this first empirical investigation of the incentive effect of property taxation, since we can separate between...

The large variation in revenues among Norwegian local governments can partly be explained by revenues collected from hydropower production. This revenue variation, combined with good data availability, can be used to extend the literature on the re- source curse in two directions. First, to...

This paper provides an empirical test of a principal tenet of fiscal federalism: that spending discretion, when granted to localities, leads to public-sector heterogeneity, with public-good levels adjusting to suit local demands. The test is based on a simple model of partial fiscal...

The purpose of the paper is to empirically investigate the determinants of maintenance spending and building conditions in Norwegian local governments. In the popular debate there is a concern that low levels of maintenance spending leads to poor building conditions, and in the long run also to...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether efficiency in public service provision is affected by political and budgetary institutions, fiscal capacity, and democratic participation. In order to address this issue we take advantage of a new global efficiency measure for Norwegian local...

Compared with most countries the Norwegian system of financing local governments is highly centralized. Grants make up a substantial part of revenues and local taxes are highly regulated by the center. The development of the system was motivated by a desire to equalize service provision...