Individual long run effects of a labour market training programme targeted at unemployed adults are evaluated by comparing mean post-training earnings for matched samples of participants and non-participants. Average training effects on the trained are positive and persistent over the...

Regional colleges in Norway were reorganised in 1994 with the purpose of promoting efficiency and productivity. This is the first effort of checking what actually has happened afterwards with efficiency and productivity. DEA and Malmquist index approaches are used. Data for three years, 1994,...

I study the effect of voters with a group-based social conscience. Voters then care more about the well-being of those belonging to their own group than the rest of the population. Within a model of political tax determination, both fractionalization and group antagonism reduce the support for...

In the period from 1970 to 2002, Norwegian women moved out of the home and into the paid labour market. The paper investigates the e®ect of this social change on women's economic position and on individual income in-equality. It argues that the distribution of individual incomes is of equal...

This paper explores the existence of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) in 19 OECD countries, over the period 1973–1999, using data for hourly nominal wages at industry level. Based on a novel nonparametric statistical method, which allows for country and year specific variation in both the...

This paper introduces two composite indices of globalization. The first is based on the Kearney/Foreign Policy magazine and the second is obtained from principal component analysis. They indicate the level of globalization and show how globalization has developed over time for different...

This paper examines internationalisation and employment dynamics in the Finnish manufacturing sector 1980–2001 using plant and industry-level data. According to the results, there is a large heterogeneity in the patterns of international trade and employment across industries and over time. In...

This study considers employment and productivity growth generated by the public funding of R&D using linked employer-employee data in Finland. Public subsidies, instrumented by available public R&D funding in the industry/region, have a positive effect on productivity growth in small and...

This paper studies the effect of foreign-owned companies (FOCs) in the region on establishment survival and growth in the Finnish business sector. We analyze whether the presence of the FOCs has asymmetric effects among the local businesses. Foreign presence in the region is measured in a novel...

The paper presents an alternative derivation of the gravity equation for foreign trade, which is explicitly based on monopolistic competition in the export markets and which is more general than previously in the literature. In contrast to the usual specification, our model allows for the...