This paper introduces a theory-based equivalence scale for public in-kind transfers, which justifies comparison of distributions of extended income (cash income plus the value of public services) between European countries. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed equivalence scale in an...

This paper develops a machine-learning method that allows researchers to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects with panel data in a setting with many covariates. Our method, which we name the dynamic causal forest (DCF) method, extends the causal-forest method of Wager and Athey (2018) by...

This paper investigates the long-term effects of local government education spending on child outcomes, including income, educational attainment, and family formation in adulthood. We propose a novel identification strategy which exploits quasirandom variation in demographic trends when there is...

Despite a broad consensus on the need to take into account the value of public services and geographical cost of living differences when measuring poverty, there is little reliable evidence on how these factors actually affect poverty estimates. Unlike the standard approach in studies of the...

Despite a broad consensus on the need to take into account the value of public services in distributional analysis, there is little reliable evidence on how the inclusion of such non-cash income actually affects poverty and inequality estimates. In particular, the equivalence scales applied to...

A cooperative bargaining model is adapted to the setting of local government in Norway. Aggregate consumption, the capital stock and net financial wealth in the local public sector are endogenized. The origin of intertia in the model is ascribed to incrementalism or adjustment costs in the...

An extended community preference model including real and financial investments is estimated on accounting time-series data for the local public sector in Norway. The estimation results indicate considerable sluggishness in local public spending, both in current expenditure and investment...

This paper treats local governments as utility maximizing agents when they allocate resources among different service sectors. We present estimates for eight service sectors, based on a modified version of the extended linear expenditure system (ELES) and using observations at the municipal...

Fiscal disparities arise from differences in costs and capacity to produce a standard package of public services. This paper proposes to use a structural modelling approach as basis for measuring fiscal disparities across municipalities. This approach differs from the widely used reduced-form...

When private goods are publicly provided at subsidized prices, government authorities have to determine the distribution of services on recipients. Such distributions are commonly based on legal regulations and professional guidelines. Thus governments are assumed to develop service standards...