The international integration of regulated markets poses new challenges for regulatory policy. One question is the implications that the overall international regulatory regime will have for cross-border and/or domestic merger activity. In particular, do non-coordinated policies stimulate...

The general opinion among power industry representatives and electricity market analysts is that the Nordic electricity market has worked well. The purpose of this paper is to explore why the Nordic electricity market has performed well and to consider to what extent the Nordic experiences are...

We have followed a pay for performance reform in the phone based customer service centre of an insurance company, from its introduction in 2001 until the end of 2004. We use hard and soft data from the design and impact of the reform to contrast two theories of work motivation; the traditional...

A widespread belief in the popular press is that job stability has declined across Western economies over the last 15 years. However, little support for this is found in the empirical literature. We use an extensive employer–employee data set for Norway to analyse changes in job stability in...

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...

We used matched employer-employee data for the period 1992-1997 to analyse the transition from work to early retirement in Norway. We focus on the effect of a new early retirement scheme ("AFP") of which some 60 percent of the population is eligible. We thus observe individuals in two different...

This paper analyses the impact of economic conditions and access to primary health care on health outcomes in Norway. Total mortality rates, grouped into four causes of death, were used as proxies for health, and the number of general practitioners (GPs) at the municipality level was used as the...

We analyze unionized firms’ incentives to outsource intermediate goods production to foreign (low-cost) subcontractors. Such outsourcing leads to increased wages for the remaining in-house production. We find that stronger unions, which implies higher domestic wages, reduce incentives for...

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the resource rent distribution aspect of the Kyoto process. The paper focuses on the “battle for resource rents” with oil consuming countries on one side and oil producing countries on the other. Our analysis is carried out within the framework of a...

The analysis, based on register data for Norwegian cohorts born 1950, 1955, and 1960, shows that the intergenerational earnings mobility is high. Using quantile regression, mobility is found to be lower at the lower end of the earnings distribution than at the upper end. The findings also...