Primary care physicians have two roles: the healer and the gatekeeper. We show that, due to information asymmetries, they cannot be expected to fulfill the latter role. Better gatekeepers will be poorer healers; hence all patients, both truly sick and shirkers, will strictly prefer physicians...

Attempts can be found in the DEA literature to identify returns to scale at efficient interior points of the production possibility set on the basis of returns to scale at points of the corresponding reference sets. However, an opposite approach is put forward in this paper, advocating that...

TNF-alpha inhibitors represent one of the most important areas of biopharmaceuticals by sales, with three blockbusters accounting for 8 % of total pharmaceutical sale in Norway. With use of a unique natural policy experiment in Norway, this paper examines to what extent the identity of the...

Organic production techniques are an increasing, though minor so far, part of agriculture, and organic wines are increasingly produced and appreciated. Nevertheless, since the organic technique is more costly, a crucial question is whether organic wines benefit from a price premium. In this...

In public good games, voluntary contributions tend to start o high and decline as the game is repeated. If high contributors are matched, however, contributions tend to stay high. We propose a formalization predicting that high contributors will selfselect into groups committed to charitable...

Many countries have followed a policy of being self-sufficient in electricity. However, in the last two decades exchange of electricity across borders has become more widespread, and the European Union's policy is to encourage a gradual expansion of crossborder trading and integration of...

We consider an industry with firms that produce a final good emitting pollution to different degree as a side effect. Pollution is regulated by a tradable quota system where some quotas may have been allocated at the outset, i.e. before the quota market is opened. We study how volatility in...

In order to estimate labour supply responses among older people we have employed a very simple model of retirement decisions that can be estimated on a single cross-section sample, and still be given a structural interpretation in terms of inter-temporal decisions. The model is estimated on...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate wage effects of occupational pensions, exploiting the introduction of mandatory occupational pensions in Norway as a source of exogenous variation in pension coverage. Various difference-in-differences models are estimated on a large sample of Norwegian...

This paper revisits the question of whether defined benefit pension plans inhibit labour mobility. Using national register data for three distinct periods, we define and calculate a measure of changes in individual pension entitlements which we term potential portability gain. Estimation results...