Unproductive enterprises that feed on productive businesses, are rampant in developing countries. These parasitic enterprises take divergent forms, some headed by violent bandits and brutal mafia bosses, others by organized middlemen or smart political insiders. All of them seem to have the...

The RAINS model is used to calculate cost minimising abatement policies subject to European-wide spatial restrictions on pollution. The principle for choosing environmental targets for the 1994 Oslo Protocol was closing a gap between benchmark- and critical loads for each grid with a uniform...

In 1989, an early retirement program (AFP) was introduced in Norway, with an eligibility age gradually decreasing from 66 to 62, and now covering about two thirds of the labour force. To assess the impact on the labour force we estimate a multinomial logit model for transitions between labour...

Informal groups cannot rely on external enforcement to insure that members abide by their obligations. It is generally assumed that these problems are solved by "social sanctions" and reputational effects. The present paper focuses on roscas, one of the most commonly found informal financial...

Benchmarking by means of applying the DEA model is appearing as an interesting alternative for regulators under the new regimes for electricity distributors. A sample of large electricity distribution utilities from Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands for the year 1997 is...

When defining and estimating the cost of children and equivalent incomes, children's consumption is normally defined as the household's cash expenditure on consumption goods for children. In fact, a heavy item in the cost of children under school age is time. This paper examines the cost of...

Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action has provided the dominant framework for understanding the impact of encompassing unions and employers confederations on wage-setting in Western Europe. In particular, scholars have drawn upon Olson's writing to descripe corporatism as a means for...

The welfare state is generally viewed as either providing redistribution from rich to poor or as providing publicly-financed insurance. Both views are incomplete. Welfare policies provide both insurance and redistribution in varying amounts, depending on the design of the policy. We explore the...

Early retirement decisions derived from a structural model with economic incentives and firm workforce changes, are estimated on Norwegian linked household and firm data. For households in which the wife is the first to become eligible for early retirement, the impact on early retirement of a...