News about Research

A microeconomic model KOMMODE has been developed to analyze the spending behavior of local governments.

MAKKO is a macro model for local government service production in Norway. The model is used to project employment and the number of clients in different local public services, and contains submodels for services like kindergartens, primary and secondary education, health care and care for the elderly.

The Norwegian tax-benefit model LOTTE is a microsimulation model developed to predict distributional and revenue effects of changes in the taxation of individuals in Norway.

Regional labour market development is a result of the interaction between supply and demand mechanisms in spatial labour markets.

Economic Survey is an English version of the quarterly business cycle report from Statistics Norway. It includes an analysis of recent trends in the Norwegian economy and a forecast two-three years ahead.

Environmental policy analyses often draw on stated preferences, with most humans having strong preferences with respect to how we view ourselves and how we would like others to perceive us. This may create systematic differences between reported and real behaviour, making policy analysis based on stated preferences difficult. In this paper, researcher Bente Halvorsen models how social and moral norms and the image we would like to project affect reported and actual behaviour.

The European Union (EU) identified some positive and negative externalities related to energy production and consumption when adopting its Renewable Energy and Climate Change Package. Given these externalities, Cathrine Hagem derives in a new Discussion Paper the optimal combination of policy instruments. Thereafter, she explores the second-best outcome, given constraints on the use of some policy instruments, due to political considerations and international regulations.

In a Discussion Paper Andreas Benedictow and Pål Boug estimate a pricing-to-market model for Norwegian import prices on textiles and wearing apparels, controlling explicitly for the removal of non-tariff barriers to trade and the shift in imports from high-cost to low-cost countries through a Törnqvist price index based measure of foreign prices.

Dag Einar Sommervoll explores how repeated revisions of consumption plans increase long-run utility in a Discussion Paper. If agents value present anticipations of future consumption, some revisions may be viewed as a benign form of self-delusion.