In recent decades new technology has led to increasing demand for well-educated labour at the expense of labour with lower education levels. Moreover, increased imports from low-cost countries have squeezed out many Norwegian manufacturing firms employing a sizeable share of workers with low...

Galí, Gertler and Lòpez-Salido (2005), GGL, assert that the hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curve, NPC, is robust to different choices of estimation procedure and so some forms of specification bias. Specifically, the dominance of forward-looking behavior is robust according to GGL. We assess...

Unemployment varies strongly between countries with comparable economic structure. Some economists have tried to explain these differences with institutional differences in the labour market. Instead, this paper focuses on a model with multiple equilibria so that the same socioeconomic structure...

Pervasive skill-biased technological changes, probably from trade in computer technology, have visualized the pros and cons of wage setting centralization in small open economies. Skill mismatch has increased in countries with wage rigidity. As a small open economy with centralized wage setting,...

Norway adopted a flexible inflation target in March 2001 following a long period with exchange rate targeting in various forms. The regime shift reverses the causal ordering between changes in the nominal exchange rate and changes in the interest rate. When the central bank targets the exchange...

Economic theories of imperfectly competitive labour markets predict that wages are linked to profits. In spite of this, profit variables are not explicitly specified in empirical models of wage formation that otherwise are appealing. Does this mean that theory overplays the role of profitability...

Existing literature have focused on the influence of institutional factors on wage determination when explaining the prolonged cross-country differences in unemployment. Although coordination of wage bargaining probably affects entry barriers and competition in product markets as well, research...

A model for matched data with two types of unobserved heterogeneity is considered – one related to the observation unit, the other to units to which the observation units are matched. One or both of the unobserved components are assumed to be random. Applying the Helmert transformation to...