Housing is a major component of aggregate demand, and understanding how the demand for housing co-varies with income is useful for analysis and policy. While estimating housing consumption for tenants amounts to observing rents, estimating housing consumption for owner-occupiers is challenging...

Conventional estimates of purchasing power parities (PPP) rely on cross-country price data. Using Engel curves, Almås (Am Econ Rev 102:1093–1117, <CitationRef CitationID="CR2">2012</CitationRef>) was, however, able to show that PPPs contain substantial bias. Since constructing conventional estimates is expensive and time consuming,...</citationref>

In the 1960s, Norway lagged behind its Scandinavian neighbors in the aggregate value of economic production per capita, as it had for decades. By the 1990s, Norway had caught up with and forged ahead of Denmark and Sweden. When and why did Norway catch up? The discovery and extraction of oil in...

Semiparametric Engel curves are used to infer bias in the Canadian CPI as a Cost of Living Index. The budget share of food has long been used as an indicator of welfare. We compare households with the same levels of CPI deflated total expenditure over the period 1978-2000. Differences in the...

Indirect taxes on transportation activities that pollute can correct externalities and close the gaps between private and social costs. However, policy makers often find such Pigou taxes difficult to implement because of political resistance due to possibly adverse affects on equity. For this...

Rental-equivalence is often used in computing price changes of owner-occupied housing in the CPI. We use an alternative approach, employing interest-adjusted house prices. For Norway 2000-2008 our method yielded a 30% CPI-increase, compared to the official 17%.

This paper investigates household purchasing behavior in response to differing alcohol and tobacco taxes near an international border. Our study suggests that large tax differentials near borders induce economically important tax avoidance behavior, which may limit a government's ability to...