A frequent form of pay-for-performance programs increase reimbursement for all services by a certain percentage of the baseline price. We examine how such a “bonus-for-quality” reimbursement scheme affects the wage contract given to physicians by the hospital management. To this end, we...

We test whether a demand response by patients exists in the Norwegian primary care sector. In Norway, physicians are remunerated either by salary or by incentive contract, and we have access to a large data survey that allows us to study the relationship between consumer satisfaction with...

We consider the effects of voluntary international environmental protocols on emissions with regard to the 1985 Helsinki Protocol and the 1994 Oslo Protocol on the reduction of sulphur oxides. Our analysis utilizes panel data from 30 European countries for the period 1960–2002. We divide these...

Many economic models and optimization problems generate (endogenous) shadow prices - alias dual variables or Lagrange multipliers. Frequently the “slopes” of resulting price curves - that is, multiplier derivatives - are of great interest. These objects relate to the Jacobian of the...

Alternative hedonic model formulations are used to compare predicted and observed prices of property transactions in alternative locations. The estimation of model parameters is based on data from Western Norway, and alternative model formulations primarily differ with respect to how spatial...

It is common to tolerate that a system's performance be unsustainable during an interim period. To live long however, its state must eventually satisfy various constraints. In this regard we design here differential inclusions that generate, in one generic format, two distinct phases of system...

A number of low- and middle-income countries have a severe shortage of health workers. This paper studies how health workers’ choices of labour supply and work effort impact on the quality of health services when health workers are in short supply. We analyse how policy measures such as...

Considered here is decentralized exchange of privately owned commodity bundles. Voluntary transactions take the form of repeated bilateral barters. Under broad and reasonable hypotheses the resulting process converges to comepetitive equilibrium. Price-taking behavior is not assumed. Prices...

Using intergenerational data with a substantial part of the life-cycle earnings of children and almost the entire life-cycle earnings for their fathers, we present new estimates of intergenerational mobility in Norway. Extending the length of the fathers’ earnings windows from 5 to 30 years...

We examine the optimal regulation of agricultural markets when farmers have organized their activity in a cooperative which is the monopoly supplier of an upstream product and which competes with a single rival firm in selling a homogenous downstream product. The rival's marginal cost is private...