The ability of the public sector to recruit skilled workers is important for the quality of public sector services. Centralized and rigid pay systems in the public sector might reduce labour supply and lead to shortages of qualified personnel in areas and periods with strong outside labour...

We develop a government decision model where efficiency wage mechanisms affect the allocation of resources between different public services. We show how the introduction of interdepartment wage relativities modifies the standard Solow wage setting conditions. We compare the outcome under...

Empirical studies of regional wage formation and interregional migration routinely include the regional unemployment rate as indicator of local labour market tightness. However, these studies are usually motivated by economic theories that emphasize transition probabilities between unemployment...

Empirical studies of interregional mobility routinely use regional unemployment differentials to characterize economic incentives to move between regions. In this paper, we present a new regional labour market indicator computed from survey data in which respondents are asked to evaluate local...

Previous research into endogenous trade policy has described extensively the political incentives of firms with specific assets, but no studies have shown directly that firms behave as predicted. We adopt insights from transaction costs economics to develop measures of asset specificity and to...

The papers studies wage formation using panel data for a large sample of Norwegian municipalities covering the time period 1970— 1992. The main conclusions are the following. Regional manufacturing wages are negatively related to regional unemployment, but the effects of open as well as total...

Economic theory predicts that local labour market tightness affects local wage setting as well as individuals’ migration decisions. But how should we measure local labour market tightness? In this paper we show that the common practice of using the local rate of unemployment as the tightness...

A rich set of regional labour market variables is utilised to explain interregional migration in Norway. In particular, regional indicators of labour market pressure are computed from survey data in which respondents are asked to evaluate local job prospects in their resident municipality and...