Rapid growth in productivity combined with increasing wage dispersion in some countries, notably Anglo-Saxon, has been the subject of numerous studies. The main hypothesis in the literature is that an increased skill premium provides a link between productivity growth and inequality. If this...

We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using twelve years of population data from Norway's administrative tax records. We document a number of novel results. First, individuals earn markedly different average returns on their net worth (a standard...

How taxation influences income mobility is largely a neglected topic. In this study we discuss the relationship between taxation and income mobility by analyzing both macro and micro data. Administrative register data based on income tax returns are used to produce individual and aggregate...

A major difficulty faced by researchers who want to study the consumption and savings behavior of households is the lack of reliable panel data on household expenditures. One possibility is to use surveys that follow the same households over time, but such data are rare and they typically have...

Most evidence on the long-run evolution of income inequality is restricted to top income shares. While this evidence is relevant and important for studying the concentration of economic power, it is incomplete as an informational basis for analysing inequality in the income distribution as a...

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...

In this article, we explore the implications of this literature for understanding the relationship between climate change policies and consumption. We identify a number of ways in which accounting for the implications of the new happiness literature could lead to laws and policies that influence...

The law of torts plays an important role in completing the legal property rights system by defining the extent to which property is protected from harm. It does this by defining the kinds of interests that will be recognized and protected from harm by the courts, the duty of care owed these...

In many developing countries, there does not exist a time series of nationally repre- sentative household budget or income surveys, while there often are urban household surveys as well as nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) which lack information on incomes. This...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived...