We suggest a probabilistic voting model where voters’ preferences for alternative public goods display habit formation. Current policies determine habit levels and in turn the future preferences of the voters. This allows the incumbent to act strategically in order to influence the probability...

We suggest a probabilistic voting model where voters’ preferences for alternative public goods display habit formation. Current policies determine habit levels and in turn the future preferences of the voters. This allows the incumbent to act strategically in order to influence the probability...

The cross-country correlations between annual per capita consumption growth in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) during the period 1973-1996 are much lower than predicted by the basic theory of international financial integration. Capturing that the consumption behavior...

Many reform proposals of the social security systems in various OECD economies suggest to scale down the non-actuarial parts of the pension systems. These reforms have a flavor of increased efficiency at the costs of welfare losses for low-income individuals. Assessing the economic effects, we...

Should the government run fiscal deficits in response to an adverse external shock that warrants transfer of resources from production of nontraded to traded goods? This article considers normative fiscal policy implications of sectoral adjustment costs in a two-sector model with overlapping...

We evaluate the policy of flexible inflation targeting implemented by the Norges Bank since March 2001. We discuss the reasons why the real interest rates are significantly higher in Norway than in the rest of Europe. Finally we propose some institutional changes that can improve the policy...

A pay-as-you-go (paygo) pension program may provide intergenerational pooling of risks toindividuals´ labor and capital income over the life cycle. By means of a model that providesilluminating closed form solutions, we demonstrate that the magnitude of the optimal paygoprogram and the nature...