The paper analyses Norwegian 19th century patentees. A special focus is on the affiliation or relationship of the patentees to the manufacturing industries, business and the wider economy. A main question is whether the inventors were what might be called ‘amateurs’ working independently, or...

What do the education premiums look like over the life cycle? What is the impact of schooling on lifetime earnings? How does the internal rate of return compare with opportunity cost of funds? To what extent do progressive taxes attenuate the incentives to invest in education? This paper...

I consider an economy with fossil fuel and renewable energy and energy storage, and search for the conditions that lead to welfare improvements when energy is stored. I then solve for the optimal decision rule and analyze the long-run tendencies of the economy-energy variables. The findings are...

We report an experimental test of the four touchstones of rationality in choice under risk – utility maximization, stochastic dominance, expected-utility maximization and small-stakes risk neutrality – with students from one of the best universities in the United States and one of the best...

Before 1893 the regional branches of Norges Bank set their own bank rates. We discuss how bank rate autonomy could be reconciled with the fixed exchange rate commitments of the silver and gold standard. Although the headquarters of the bank was in Trondhjem, we find that the Christiania branch...

I estimate the effects of public health insurance on consumption smoothing and investigate the extent to which the public insurance interacts with private arrangements of self-insurance. Exploiting a dramatic expansion in health insurance coverage in rural China, I find that the introduction of...

This study reconsiders the empirical question of whether men’s earnings increase because of children. Large Norwegian register data are used for brother and twin pairs who are followed over their life cycle from their first entry into the labour market. The data permit family-fixed effects to...

Does survey data contain useful information for estimating macroeconomic models? We address this question by using survey data of inflation expectations to estimate the New Keynesian model by Smets and Wouters (2007) and compare its performance under rational expectations and adaptive learning....

This paper provides a new simple and computationally tractable method for determining an identified set that can account for a broad set of economic models when economic variables are discrete. Using this method it is shown on a simple example how can imperfect instruments affect the size of the...

This paper studies the effects of price regulation and parallel imports in the on-patent pharmaceutical market. First, we develop a theory model in which a pharmacy negotiates producer prices with a brand-name firm and then sets retail prices. We show that the effects of price regulation...