Empirical examination of whether R&D subsidies to private firms crowd out private investments has been hampered by problems related to selection. A particular worry is that research intentions and the quality of current research ideas may be correlated with the likelihood of applying for and...

The public health care systems in the Nordic countries provide high quality care almost free of charge to all citizens. However, social inequalities in health persist. Previous research has, for example, documented substantial educational inequalities in cancer survival. We investigate to what...

Do wage differences between workers with high and low levels of education, between males and females and between workers with different levels of experience reflect differences in productivity? We address this set of questions on the basis of a data set with variables for individual workers...

Survival rates are widely used to compare quality of health care. In this paper we introduce post-illness employment as a supplemental indicator of successful treatment of serious diseases. Utilizing rich register based data on cancer patients we document substantial differences across Norwegian...

This paper studies the distributions of literacy skills, education, and employment of immigrants and natives in three host countries: Canada, the United States, and Norway. For natives, we uncover remarkably stable relations between literacy skills, schooling, and employment across countries....

In 1998 the Norwegian government introduced a program that substantially increased parents’ incentives to stay home with children under the age of three. Many eligible children had older siblings, and we investigate how this program affected long-run educational outcomes of the older siblings....

We develop an econometric model for firm exit, using stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) as a starting point. According to SDP, the value of an operating firm can be written as the sum of (i) the net present value of continuing production if the firm is committed to a future exit date, and (ii)...

Women make up almost 50 percent of the employed population in Norway, but only about 25 percent of the entrepreneurs. Using registry data on the whole population we address gender differences in the propensity to become an entrepreneur. We do so by analysing transition from ordinary wage...