We estimate Engel elasticities of housing expenditures for each independent cross-section of the Consumer Expenditure Surveys in the period 1986-1998, and find that the elasticity remains close to unity for all years. Its mean over the period is 1.02. Engel and demographic effects for housing...

This article presents a new way of estimating latent total consumption in a household that may improve the accuracy of studies into permanent income and consumption inequality. While the frequently used total purchase expenditure in a household is an unbiased estimator of latent total household...

This article describes the consumption model and inequality study of Chapter 2 in the author's unpublished Ph.D. dissertation submitted at the Dept. of Economics, University of California, Berkeley. The Norwegian Research Council and Statistics Norway financed the project; project no....

Growth studies show, counter to intuition, that the discovery of a natural resource may be a curse rather than a blessing since resource-rich countries grow slower than others. But it has been suggested that Norway may be an important exception to the curse and that the curse does not afflict...

This article uses the Case-Shiller technique for constructing housing price indices on a Norwegian data set of transactions for the period 1991-2002 consisting of 10 376 pairs of repeated sales. Using a weighted least squares scheme in order to control for heteroskedasticity, we construct a...

There is considerable interest in identifying the magnitude of the difference between increases in CPI and costs-of-living, and this article uses the technique proposed by Hamilton (2001) to measure this discrepancy for Norway for the 90s. The method is extended along several dimensions by...

In the 1960s, Norway lagged behind its Scandinavian neighbors in the aggregate value of economic production per capita, as it had for decades. By the 1990s, Norway had caught up with and forged ahead of Denmark and Sweden. When and why did Norway catch up? The discovery and extraction of oil in...

Measuring change in the price of housing is an important and notoriously difficult task for national statistical agencies. Different approaches have been attempted, but suffer from known weaknesses. This article suggests dividing housing outlays into consumption and saving. The changes in prices...

Indirect taxes on transportation activities that pollute can correct externalities and close the gaps between private and social costs. However, policy makers often find such Pigou taxes difficult to implement because of political resistance due to possibly adverse affects on equity. For this...

Owner-occupied housing services and rented housing services are often considered close substitutes, and both house price and rental price indices rely on regressions based on dwelling and location characteristics. However, while such characteristics are exhaustive in the owner's market, they...