Few economic analyses examine land trusts, their decisions, and the land-trust “industry,” despite their growing importance. For example, statistics on the wide variation in the number of trusts in different regions of the United States raise questions about whether such variation makes...

Recent theoretical contributions indicate favorable incentive effects of property taxation on public service providers. The object of this paper is to confront these theories with data from Norwegian school districts. The institutional setting in Norway is well suited for analyzing the effects...

This paper investigates to which extent students in higher education respond to financial incentives by adjusting their study behavior. Students in Norway who completed certain graduate study programs between autumn 1990 and 1995 on stipulated time were entitled to a restitution of approximately...

How can geographical proximity to college explain field of study choices? We empirically address this question using the major expansion of university colleges in Norway in the second half of the twentieth century, when 33 new education institutions were established in areas that did not...

Recent descriptive work suggests the type of college education (field or institution) is an important but neglected pathway through which individuals sort into homogeneous marriages. These descriptive studies raise the question of why college graduates are so likely to marry someone within their...

What difference does government support of business R&D make to the rate of innovation? Addressing this important question has deep theoretical roots and broadening practical applications in OECD countries. The analysis of output additionality has been hampered by incomplete data combined with...

Simultaneity represents a fundamental problem when estimating the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour. To overcome this problem, a wide variety of external instruments has been applied in the literature. However, the use of instruments may lead to wrong inference if they are...

This paper investigates firm dynamics in the period before, during, and after an event consisting of a first published patent application. The analysis is based on patent data from the Norwegian Industrial Property Office merged with data from several business registers covering a period of...

This paper revisits the estimation of private returns to R&D. In an extension of the standard approach, we allow for endogeneity of production decisions, heterogeneity of R&D elasticities, and asymmetric treatment of intramural and extramural R&D. Our empirical analyses are based on an extended...

In this paper, we investigate whether better information about the macroeconomic environment of an economy has a positive impact on its capital inflows, namely portfolio and foreign direct investment (FDI). The purpose of our study is to explicitly quantify information asymmetries by compliance...