Government enterprises are vulnerable to political intervention and influence of various interest groups. The theoretical literature emphasizes the role multiple and conflicting goals that distorts incentives and accountability. We offer empirical evidence of the importance of the political...

The literature on intergenerational conflict and public budgets has shown that the demands of the elderly may crowd out educational spending. We extend this literature to take into account altruism within the family where individuals care about the welfare of family members. The conflicting...

Quasi-markets have become fashionable within health care. This is also the case in Norway where primary physician services are organized as a quasi-market. Physicians compete for patients, and patients can choose another physician if they are not satisfied with the physician they have. This is...

As with the market for goods and services, democratic competition involves political parties offering their services (policy programs) to citizen-consumers who vote for their preferred partisan supplier. Little is known about the partial effect of a shift in parties’ seat shares for given...

Studies of government budget-making recurrently describe it as a bargaining process between `guardians' and `advocates'. Yet this observation has not been implemented in formal modelling of budgetary processes. This paper employs a Nash model to analyse local government budgeting. The model is...

Birth weight is an important predictor of health and success in later life. Little is known about the effect of mothers' education on birth weight. A few causal analyses have been done, but they show conflicting results. We estimated the effect of mothers' education on birth weight by using data...

A recurrent assertion is that aging will intensify age-related conflict over public budget allocation. If people are led by their self-interest, the young will prioritize public education services, while the elderly will demand better pensions and health-care services. Addressing this issue...

The article discusses the justification for disparities in the local government supply. Equality can be defined as equality in the individual's `terms of trade' in respect of the municipality (benefit/effort equation), and the distribution of specific local government services. There are four...

The present paper examines whether supplier-induced demand exists for primary physician services in Norway. The research design is adapted to the institutional setting of Norwegian primary physician services, where there is a fixed fee schedule. More than 50% of primary care physicians receive a...

R<sc>attsø</sc> J. and S<sc>tokke</sc> H. E. Population divergence and income convergence: regional distribution dynamics for Norway, <italic>Regional Studies</italic>. Regional population divergence follows from in-migration to cities with high income levels. The dynamic relationship between population and income is...