After a forecast failure, a respecification is usually necessary to account for the data "ex post", in which case there is a gain in knowledge as a result of the forecast failure. Using Norwegian consumption as an example, we show that the financial deregulation in the mid-1980s led to forecast...

Models of labor supply derived from stochastic utility representations and discretized sets of feasible hours of work have gained popularity because they are more practical than standard approaches based on marginal calculus. In this paper we argue that practicality is not the only feature that...

This paper studies the distributions of literacy skills, education, and employment of immigrants and natives in three host countries: Canada, the United States, and Norway. For natives, we uncover remarkably stable relations between literacy skills, schooling, and employment across countries....

Amartya Sen has developed the so-called capability approach to meet the criticism that income alone may be insufficient as a measure of economic inequality. This is because knowledge about people’s income does not tell us what they are able to acquire with that income. For example, people with...

This paper discusses a modeling framework in which workers are assumed to choose their preferred job from latent worker-specific choice sets. This point of departure yields a framework that formalizes the widely used ad hoc approaches (fixed cost of working and dummies at peak hours) in the...

This paper discusses how specification of probabilistic models for multistate duration data generated by individual choices should be justified on a priori theoretical grounds. Preferences are assumed represented by random utilities, where utilities are viewed as random also to the agent...

We find that the Norwegian R&D tax credit scheme introduced in 2002 mainly works as intended. The scheme is cost-effective and it is used by a large number of firms. It stimulates these firms to invest more in R&D, and, in particular, the effect is positive for small firms with little R&D...

This paper analyzes labor force participation with particular reference to the discouraged worker effect. Discouraged workers are those who do not search for work because they view their chances of finding a suitable job as too low. The theoretical point of departure is a search model where the...

In 1998 the Norwegian government introduced a program that substantially increased parents’ incentives to stay home with children under the age of three. Many eligible children had older siblings, and we investigate how this program affected long-run educational outcomes of the older siblings....

The public health care systems in the Nordic countries provide high quality care almost free of charge to all citizens. However, social inequalities in health persist. Previous research has, for example, documented substantial educational inequalities in cancer survival. We investigate to what...