Taxes on housing consumption have attractive features. They can enhance overall efficiency, function as automatic stabilizers, and work progressively. Implementation, however, requires a careful balance between economic ambition and political reality. This article suggests a 5-stage procedure:...

Measuring change in the price of housing is an important and notoriously difficult task for national statistical agencies. Different approaches have been attempted, but suffer from known weaknesses. This article suggests dividing housing outlays into consumption and saving. The changes in prices...

This article uses the Case-Shiller technique for constructing housing price indices on a Norwegian data set of transactions for the period 1991-2002 consisting of 10 376 pairs of repeated sales. Using a weighted least squares scheme in order to control for heteroskedasticity, we construct a...

Indirect taxes on transportation activities that pollute can correct externalities and close the gaps between private and social costs. However, policy makers often find such Pigou taxes difficult to implement because of political resistance due to possibly adverse affects on equity. For this...

The question of whether the housing market is efficient or not is posed by an increasing number of economists, policymakers, current homeowners and prospective homebuyers. This article tests the efficiency hypothesis on data from the Norwegian housing market in its capital, Oslo. We employ the...

Owner-occupied housing services and rented housing services are often considered close substitutes, and both house price and rental price indices rely on regressions based on dwelling and location characteristics. However, while such characteristics are exhaustive in the owner's market, they...

Standard practice of estimating purchasing power parities (PPP) involves using prices, in domestic currencies, of a common basket of goods and services, then calculating the price-equalizing exchange rate. In this article, I substitute observed consumer behavior for price data. On the assumption...

We estimate Engel elasticities of housing expenditures for each independent cross-section of the Consumer Expenditure Surveys in the period 1986-1998, and find that the elasticity remains close to unity for all years. Its mean over the period is 1.02. Engel and demographic effects for housing...

This article studies environmental and distributional effects from a differentiated tax system on a set of disaggregated transportation goods. Empirical examination on Norwegian data indicates that higher tax rates on high-pollution luxury modes of transportation such as air flights and taxis...

Growth studies show, counter to intuition, that the discovery of a natural resource may be a curse rather than a blessing since resource-rich countries grow slower than others. But it has been suggested that Norway may be an important exception to the curse and that the curse does not afflict...