This article is in three parts. First, it briefly describes the contribution of natural resources to economic growth around the world, pondering the question whether an abundance of natural resources is a blessing or a curse. Second, an attempt is made to provide a glimpse of recent empirical...

We study the relationship between regulatory regimes and pharmaceutical firms' pricing strategies using a unique policy experiment from Norway, which in 2003 introduced a reference price (RP) system called index pricing for a sub-sample of off-patent pharmaceuticals, replacing the existing price...

Evidence of owners of small businesses engaging in tax motivated shifts in organizational form is scarce. The main reason is lack of micro data enabling us to track tax-payers' movements across organizational modes. By exploiting new panel data that combine information from several public...

The literature provides ambiguous results on the effect of taxes on businesses' choice of organizational form, partly due to a lack of good firm-level data. Our micro data covers the full population of non-financial Norwegian corporations over ten years. During this period, the dual income tax...

This study argues that parents have a desire for dividing equally between their children, and that this motive applies to transfers of gifts inter vivos. We suggest that the equal division motive competes with traditional altruism: support to the child or the children with greatest needs. When...

The introduction of the 2006 Norwegian shareholder income tax was announced in advance, and it increased top marginal tax rates on individual dividend income from zero to 28 percent. We document strong timing effects on dividend payout on a large panel of non-listed corporations, with a surge of...

This paper argues that the consumption value of education is an important motivation for the educational choice. While controlling for ability, we document that individuals are willing to forego substantial future wage returns in order to acquire a particular type of higher education. We...

Lower birth weight babies have worse outcomes, both short-run in terms of one-year mortality rates and longer run in terms of educational attainment and earnings. However, recent research has called into question whether birth weight itself is important or whether it simply reflects other...

This paper quantifies the economic well-being of different age groups and the extent of their reliance on incomes from public and private sources. The aim is to establish how social benefits, and the taxes needed to finance them, affect income levels and disparities across different age groups....

We analyze short and long-term effects of worker displacement. Our focus is on prime-age male workers displaced from Norwegian manufacturing plants. We find that displacement increases the probability of exiting the labor force by about 5 percentage points. This indicates that studies using data...