New research

The increased demand from the petroleum sector and the increase in the spending of “oil revenues” has had a major impact on the high economic growth over the past decade; it has increased employment and reduced unemployment. It has also diminished cost competitiveness and thereby reduced activity in traditional exposed industries.

Economic Survey is an English version of the quarterly business cycle report from Statistics Norway. It includes an analysis of recent trends in the Norwegian economy and a forecast two-three years ahead.

Environmental policy analyses often draw on stated preferences, with most humans having strong preferences with respect to how we view ourselves and how we would like others to perceive us. This may create systematic differences between reported and real behaviour, making policy analysis based on stated preferences difficult. In this paper, researcher Bente Halvorsen models how social and moral norms and the image we would like to project affect reported and actual behaviour.

The European Union (EU) identified some positive and negative externalities related to energy production and consumption when adopting its Renewable Energy and Climate Change Package. Given these externalities, Cathrine Hagem derives in a new Discussion Paper the optimal combination of policy instruments. Thereafter, she explores the second-best outcome, given constraints on the use of some policy instruments, due to political considerations and international regulations.

Dag Einar Sommervoll explores how repeated revisions of consumption plans increase long-run utility in a Discussion Paper. If agents value present anticipations of future consumption, some revisions may be viewed as a benign form of self-delusion.

In a Discussion Paper Andreas Benedictow and Pål Boug estimate a pricing-to-market model for Norwegian import prices on textiles and wearing apparels, controlling explicitly for the removal of non-tariff barriers to trade and the shift in imports from high-cost to low-cost countries through a Törnqvist price index based measure of foreign prices.

In the longer run, effects on R&D and the implementation of advanced abatement technology may be at least as important as short-run cost effectiveness when we evaluate public environmental policy. Halvor Briseid Storrøsten's Discussion Paper shows that the number of firms that adopt advanced abatement technology could be higher with emissions trading than with a tax if there is imperfect competition in the permits market.

A report by Marte Rønning shows that pupils from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to spend no time on homework than pupils from higher socio-economic backgrounds. The report also shows a positive effect of homework on average. However, not all pupils seem to benefit from homework.

A Discussion Paper by Christian Brinch presents identication results for the mixed proportional hazards model when duration data are interval-censored. Earlier positive results on identication under intervalcensoring require both parametric specication on how covariates enter the hazard functions and assumptions of unbounded support for covariates. New results provided here show how one can dispense with both of these assumptions.