The idea of road pricing as a function of congestion costs in the United Kingdom (U.K.) was put forward in a seminal report published by the U.K. Ministry of Transport in 1964. After 35 years, little has been done and the reasons behind this delay are mainly political, as the failure to...

We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or its composition, while onshore oil has only modest effects on non-oil GDP...

This paper focuses on urban road pricing as a demand management policy that is often regarded as radical and generally unacceptable. Road pricing often gets delayed or abandoned due to low acceptability. This may be due to the fact that complex interactions and drivers of change affect road...

The role of various types of road user tolls has been an important part of Norwegian transport development for a number of years. There are now around 50 such projects in operation around the country. This paper examines the urban toll ring projects and presents results from new research into...

Transport systems in the UK are facing severe problems of congestion, rising energy use and pollution. One response to this is the move from local authorities to gradually introduce Travel Demand Management (TDM) strategies, but these measures involve a complicated set of institutions,...

The thesis collects four essays in the fields of competition and innovation economics. In chapter 1, we review the recent growth literature that analyses the effects of product market competition on growth. Contrary to the negative effect predicted by the early endogenous growth models, this...

Chapter 1 introduces the thesis providing an overview of the common themes and methods underlying this research. Chapter 2 reports an experiment that examines the characteristics of effective leaders in a leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We focus on two factors: leaders’...

The evaluation of economic forecasts is a substantial and important aspect of economic research, and a considerable part of such evaluation is performed by comparing competing forecasts. This thesis focuses on the development of statistical procedures in order that reliable comparison of...

Intellectual property (IP) regimes serve dual purposes: to provide incentives for the generation and commercialization of innovations and to foster dissemination and use of knowledge. An IP regime alone cannot maximize these two objectives simultaneously. After all, IP establishes incentives to...