This paper utilizes a Norwegian experiment with exogenous wage changes to study teacher’s turnover decisions. Within a completely centralized wage setting system, teachers in schools with a high degree of teacher vacancies in the past got a wage premium of about 10 percent during the period...

Accumulation of education and geographic concentration of educated people in cities are expected to generate urban income growth. New economic geography predicts income divergence across regions. We investigate the dynamic process of accumulating tertiary education and regional income growth in...

I attempt to find the causal effect of endogenous population size on quality of life. Quantity and quality of consumer amenities would increase with urban scale if not offset by congestion effects. To deal with endogeneity, I utilize a quasi-experimental design where I exploit the exogenous...

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...

Thailand has experienced economic growth well above world averages for about 40 years. It is a challenge to understand the sources of this high growth path, and in particular why growth has not slowed down with assumed decreasing returns to capital. We develop an intertemporal general equilbrium...

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...

This paper analysis the link between political strength and public sector wages using a unique matched individual-employer data set for Norwegian local governments during the period 1990-1998. The results indicate that political strength, measured in several ways, has a positive effect on wages,...

There is no consensus in the empirical literature on how entry of multinational supermarket chains affects farmers in developing countries. We quantify the dynamic effects of supermarket expansion on agriculture within a structural framework that clarifies the adjustment mechanisms involved. The...

The barrier model of productivity growth suggests that individual country productivity is related to the world technology frontier disturbed by national barriers. We offer a country study of the barrier model exploiting the dramatic changes in the linkages to the world economy in South Africa....

Using a comprehensive administrative database we exploit independent quasiexperimental methods to estimate the effect of class size on student achievement in Norway. The first method is based on a maximum class size rule in the spirit Angrist and Lavy (1999). The second method exploits...