This descriptive study discusses the effects of increases in domestic gas prices on the Russian gas market. Domestic natural gas prices have remained below their long-run marginal cost for more than a decade since Russia’s movement toward a market economy in 1991. As a result, the ability of...

This paper investigates the determinants of Norwegian import prices of manufactures over the period 1970(1) - 1991(4). Multivariate cointegration analysis establishes a long-run relationship between import prices, foreign prices, the exchange rate and domestic unit labour costs. Normalized on...

This article uses the Case-Shiller technique for constructing housing price indices on a Norwegian data set of transactions for the period 1991-2002 consisting of 10 376 pairs of repeated sales. Using a weighted least squares scheme in order to control for heteroskedasticity, we construct a...

Hall's (1988) approach to study price- cost margins is adapted to simultaneously estimate price- cost margins and scale economies from a panel of plant level data. The paper shows how this methodology provides a very flexible framework with only a few, economically interesting parameters to be...

In order to analyse the consequences of uncertainty for prices and efficiency in a hydropower system, we apply a two-period model with uncertainty in water inflow. We study three different market structures, perfect competition, monopoly and oligopoly and stress the importance of the shape of...

This paper analyses the general equilibrium relationship between increases in tax financed public employment and total employment, emphasizing one income effect: Reallocating employment from the private to the public sector reduces non-labour income in the form of profits distributed to workers,...

Official forecasts for oil revenues and the burden of pensioners are used to estimate forward-looking fiscal policy rules for Norway and compared with permanent-income and bird-in-hand rules. The results suggest that fiscal reactions have been partial forward-looking with respect to the rising...

A number of European countries changed their tax system in the early 1990s along the lines of the US tax reform act of 1986. After the reforms marginal tax rates were generally lower, and mortgage interest deductions less generous. At the same time a long period of house appreciation started in...

We use a CGE model to estimate the social cost of a marginal increase in public expenditure in Norway. Norway exemplifies an economy with high taxes. Distortionary taxes imply wedges between the market prices and the corresponding shadow prices. The shadow prices are unobservable, which is the...

This paper analyses the effects of so-called "green" tax reforms on a small, open economy producing an imperfect substitute for foreign goods, using an intertemporal general equilibrium model. The labour market is characterised by union wage setting, and a fixed exchange rate implies wage...