How is lending to developing countries from bilateral and multilateral creditors affected by sovereign defaults? The existing empirical literature on reputational costs of defaults focuses on lending from private creditors. Many developing countries, however, mostly rely on grants and loans from...

Three Nordic countries, Norway, Finland and Sweden, and Japan had experienced the severe financial crisis after the rapid asset price increase in almost the same period. However the recovery was fast in Nordic countries, while Japan experienced a prolonged recession, so called lost two decades....

Empirical studies suggest little impact of foreign aid on growth on average. As aid can be viewed as a sovereign rent akin to natural resource rents, it is likely that rent seeking plays a role in explaining this disappointing outcome. The analytic starting point of this paper is the long chain...

Sickness absence has risen over the past years in Norway. One explanation put forward is that a tougher labor market represents a health hazard, while a competing hypothesis predicts that loss of job security works as a disciplinary device. In this analysis we aim to trace a causal impact of...

We investigate whether a worker’s sickness absence is affected by her colleagues’ absences from the workplace. The analysis is based on unique matched employer-employee data for Norwegian schoolteachers for the period 2001 to 2006 with information on different types of absences and multiple...

This paper studies the effect of improved neonatal health care on mortality and long run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of Very Low Birth Weight (VLBW), which assigns...

In this paper, we study the effects of introducing endogenous costs in a Tullock model of rent-seeking. We show that unions can be efficiency improving, and that the firms' level of effort depends more critically upon the number of firms participating in the contests when unions are present. We...

The main objects below are transferable-utility games in which each agent faces an optimization problem, briefly called production planning, constrained by his resource endowment. Coalitions can pool members's resources. Such production games are here extended to accomodate uncertainty about...

In non-cooperative models of the family, improved productivity in contribution to a family good typically implies that, in equilibrium, one contributes more to the public good, while one's spouse contributes less. Thus, improves contribution productivity has a negative strategic effect on one's...

In non-cooperative family models, being good at contributing to family public good like household production may reduce one's utility, since it tends to crowd out contributions from one's spouse. Similar effects also arise in cooperative models with non-cooperative threat point: improved...