The paper investigates the relationships between costs and user charges in the sewage industry in Norwegian local governments. The purpose of the analysis is to answer the following questions: (i) To what extent is a higher unit cost passed on to consumers in terms of a higher user charge? (ii)...

Income levels are higher in cities. The evidence for the income gap between urban and rural areas is overwhelming, but the agglomeration effect is hard to identify. Recent advances make use of individual level data to separate out sorting and instrumentation to handle the endogeneity of...

Income taxation may affect the regional allocation of population when prices vary over space. Our contribution is to compare different income tax systems in a migration equilibrium model for Norway using improved measure of regional wage differences. We apply register data of individual wages...

The paper integrates two mechanisms of economic growth, barriers to international spillovers and skill - biased effects on the income distribution. South Africa is an interestin g case study because of dramatic changes in international barriers over time and policy focus to productivity and...

Accumulation of education and geographic concentration of educated people in cities are expected to generate urban income growth. New economic geography predicts income divergence across regions. We investigate the dynamic process of accumulating tertiary education and regional income growth in...