The paper investigates the intertemporal spending behavior of Scandinavian local governments with particular attention to liquidity constraints imposed by balanced-budget-rules and other regulations. The main finding is that Danish local governments are more able to smooth current expenditures...

Labour-market polarization is characterized by increased employment in occupations at the top but also at the bottom of the skills and wage distributions, followed by a relative decline in 'middling' occupations. This paper documents a polarization trend also in the Nordic labour markets and...

Based on matched employer-employee data from Norway, we analyze the effects of worker displacement in 1986-1987 on their children's earnings in 1999-2001. Using displacement of fathers to indicate an exogenous earnings shock we seek to identify whether family resources have a direct effect on...

Using Norwegian intergenerational data with a substantial part of the life-cycle earnings of children and almost the entire life-cycle earnings for their fathers, we present new estimates of intergenerational mobility. Extending the length of the fathers' earnings windows from 5 to 30 years...

This paper examines the impact of performance-related pay on wage differentials within firms. Our theoretical framework predicts that, compared to a fixed pay system, pay schemes based on individual output increase within-firm wage inequality, while group-based bonuses have minor effects on wage...

In this paper we analyse early retirement pathways for Norwegian male and female workers. We apply a multinomial logit model to a data set covering more than 10 500 employees, ages 56-61, in 1989. The aim is to analyse the transition to different destinations, i.e. disability pension,...

In this paper we analyse early retirement for men and women focusing on family characteristics such as marital status, spouse income and wealth, and spouses? labour market status. The female participation rate is high in Norway, implying that the country is particularly suitable for the study of...

During the 1950-70s Norway had relatively low GDP per capita compared to the OECD average and even more so compared to Denmark and Sweden. During the 1970s there was a significant catch-up in incomes and from the early 1990s a take-off in relative income. Norway is currently ranked among the...

Previous research on changes in intergenerational mobility suggests that mobility is decreasing over time. One explanation for this pattern is increased cross-sectional income inequality. In contrast to most other OECD countries, income inequality in Norway has been remarkably stable through...