Rune Jørgen Sørensen

Economics and Human Biology 52 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2023.101339

Kyklos (Basel) 77(1) p. 57-76 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/kykl.12358

Politicians are commonly believed to gain financially from holding and/or having held office. We argue that there may often also be economic downsides to pursuing a political career, and investigate whether and when politicians can(not) capitalize on their political experience. We thereby study both entry into and exit from political office, and directly compare the returns to politics across government levels and types of politicians. Empirically, we build on detailed information from Norwegian administrative register data over the period 1970-2019 to study individual-level income developments before, during and after a political career at the national and local levels (covering nearly 22,000 individuals and 700,000 person-years). Using an event-study methodology, we show that politicians on average witness a significant income boost during their time in office. In sharp contrast, leaving political office is on average associated with a substantial drop in income, which generally outweighs the income gain from entry into office. These findings suggest that most politicians face a net present value loss from holding office.

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 210 p. 163-179 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2023.04.007

The paper studies the effect of politicians’ education levels on government efficiency. Using data on Norwegian local government, the paper measures efficiency by DEA-productivity indicators and comprehensive indicators of service production. The identification of causal effects exploits close (within-list) elections to design an instrumental variable for council shares with higher education. Consistent with survey data, the estimates show that better-educated politicians induce higher levels of efficiency, particularly for old-age care services. A similar empirical strategy indicates that political experience has small efficiency effects. Educational misrepresentation has modest effects on fiscal allocations and is mostly canceled out by the efficiency gains.

Journal of Politics 86(1) p. 170-182 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/726918

In many countries, public sector employees are eligible to hold political offices during their employment as civil servants. This often triggers conflict-of-interest concerns that elected public employees might sway policies to their professional benefit. In this article, we build on representation scholarship in political science and public administration to assess such substantive effects of public employees’ political representation using detailed Norwegian administrative register and survey data (2003–19). Our main results indicate that public employees differ little from other members within their party in terms of ideology and policy preferences. They do, however, appear to move their party slightly toward the left of the political spectrum, consistent with preference spillover effects induced by heightened public sector representation. Finally, using an instrumental variable approach exploiting close elections, we find that political representation of public employees is associated with at best modest public spending, employment, and wage effects at the local level.

jop.blogs.uni-hamburg.de

Electoral Studies: an international journal on voting and electoral systems and strategy 78 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2022.102485

Ageing is often believed to induce a movement towards the right of the political spectrum. Yet, empirical evidence remains inconclusive due to a dearth of longitudinal datasets covering multiple cohorts. Using eleven rotating panels of the Norwegian Election Studies (1977–2017) and exploiting first-derivative properties of the vote choice function, our empirical approach identifies non-linear life-cycle effects while controlling for cohort and period effects. Our main findings indicate that shifting towards the left is more likely among the young (under 40 years) whereas shifting towards the right occurs at an older age (over 55 years). Evaluating potential mechanisms, we find that individuals’ income, retirement, family status and political interest explain only a small part of the observed ageing effect. Life-cycle shifts in (some) policy preferences may play a bigger role. Finally, aging effects are similar across women and men, and only marginally stronger among groups with lower education and income levels.

Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2022.2127882

We study the effects of parenting style on students’ school performance, assuming that immigrant parents’ child-rearing strategies derive from their country of origin. Following Doepke and Zilibotti [2017. Parenting with style: Altruism and paternalism in intergenerational preference transmission. Econometrica, 85(5), 1331–1371. https://do.org/10.3982/ ECTA14634], we measure patterns of parenting using data from the World Value and European Value Surveys. We combine these data with Norwegian register data on students’ test scores and exam results. Non-authoritarian parenting styles that encourage hard work (authoritativeness) or allow students to develop their independence and imagination (permissiveness) yield the better educational outcomes.

Journal of Public Economics 209 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2022.104650

Economic theory and evidence suggest that political leaders take advantage of government revenue windfalls – particularly from natural resource exploitation – to enrich themselves. We revisit this hypothesis by combining information on massive local government hydropower and petroleum revenues in Norway with five decades of registry data on individual mayors’ earnings and wealth. We find that, while the resource expansions massively boost local government revenues and spending, there is no evidence that mayors exploit the windfalls to enrich themselves. We attribute our precisely estimated zero-finding to characteristics of the Norwegian institutional and informational environment. First, we show that the revenue windfalls induce citizens to seek political information and raise their rates of electoral participation. Second, in the early sample period when local newspapers were more important, mayors’ wage responses were negatively related to newspaper coverage. In sum, our results suggest that voter information is a key disciplining accountability mechanism, potentially explaining our zero-rent result.

American Political Science Review 116(1) p. 367-373 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305542100099X

Does working in the public rather than the private sector have a causal effect on electoral participation? Extant evidence using cross-sectional survey data remains unpersuasive due to data limitations and concerns posed by preference-based job selection. We address these challenges using population-wide individual-level register data on voter turnout covering four Norwegian local and national elections between 2013 and 2019. We identify causal effects by tracking the same individuals over time during (a) shifts between private- and public-sector employment, (b) relocations between municipalities, and (c) shifts into retirement. We find that local public-sector employees display 1–3 percentage points higher voter turnout compared with private-sector employees. These effects arise particularly when working in their residential municipality, but they largely dissipate upon retirement.

Journal of Public Economics 200 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2021.104457

How do parties motivate candidates to exert effort in closed-list elections, where seat outcomes are uncertain only for candidates in marginal list positions? We argue that parties can solve this moral hazard problem by committing ex ante to allocate higher offices in government, such as cabinet portfolios, monotonically with list rank. Under this schedule of compensation, parties have incentives to rank candidates in order of quality (under some conditions) and candidates have incentives to increase the volume and geo-diversity of their campaign efforts as their rank improves. Using detailed data on Norwegian candidates and their use of mass and social media in recent elections, we confirm that (1) candidate quality increases with list rank, and (2) candidates in safer ranks shift from intra-district to extra-district and national media exposure—a composition of effort that can increase their party’s chance of entering government, and thus their own potential share of the spoils.

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART) 32(2) p. 326-341 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muab034

Countries have widely diverging regulations regarding the eligibility of public sector employees for political office, and the stringency of such regulations remains fiercely debated. Building on a demand and supply model of political selection, this article contributes to such debates by studying whether and how the incentives of public employees as both consumers and producers of public services (their ‘double motive’) affects their descriptive political representation. Our analysis employs population-wide individual-level register data covering four Norwegian local elections between 2007 and 2019 (N>13 million observations). Using predominantly individual-level panel regression models, we find that public employees are strongly overrepresented on election lists and have a higher probability of election (conditional on running). Looking at underlying mechanisms, we provide evidence consistent with the ‘double motive’ of public employees inducing their self-selection into standing for elected office (at higher-ranked ballot positions). Demand-side effects deriving from party and voter selection receive more limited empirical support. We discuss ensuing concerns about the potential substantive representation of policy self-interests by elected public employees.

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART) 31(3) p. 596-615 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaa053

Building on agency-theoretical perspectives of public bureaucracies, we argue that politician–bureaucrat preference alignment can have important implications for bureaucrats’ pay. We study such private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians using detailed data on all 1,632 top administrators active in all Norwegian municipalities over a period of 25 years (1991–2015). Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician–bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of top bureaucrats ran for political office. We focus explicitly on individuals at the very top of the administrative hierarchy and are able to separate the intensive margin (i.e., wage increases) from any additional effects at the extensive margin (i.e., new appointments). Using close elections for inference in a regression discontinuity analysis, we find that politician–bureaucrat alignment significantly increases top bureaucrats’ wage even in the Norwegian civil service system. This has important implications also from a theoretical perspective. Our results indeed go against predictions from models with policymotivated bureaucrats, but are consistent with politically aligned principal–agent matches being more productive.

Social Science and Medicine 245 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.112601

We estimated the effects of education on mortality and causes of death in Norway. We identified causal effects by exploiting the staggered implementation of a school reform that increased the length of compulsory education from seven to nine years. The municipality-level education data were combined with complete records of all deaths from 1960 to 2015 from the Norwegian Cause of Death Registry. These data covered the entire life span of persons aged 16–64. One additional year of education caused a reduction in mortality of about 10% for men. The effect was negligible for women. For men, a large part of the effect was due to fewer accidental deaths. We suggest two explanations for this finding. First, there are differences in risk-taking behaviour between people with a high level of education and those with a low level. Second, more education leads to upward occupational mobility. This mobility is mainly from occupations for which the risk of accidents is high to occupations for which the risk is low. Our results supported the fundamental cause theory. This is because education had a stronger effect on mortality for causes of death that are preventable than for causes of death that are not preventable. More education had no effect on the probability of dying of diseases that were amenable to medical intervention only. This gives some support to our results that patients are treated equally, independent of their level of education. This may be due to the large public involvement in financing and provision of health services.

British Journal of Political Science 51(3) p. 1348-1355 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123419000607

Support for environmental protection is generally perceived as driven by cohort or generational effects. We argue and empirically illustrate that such attitudes also fluctuate over the life cycle. Using rotating panels of the Norwegian Election Studies (1989-2013), our analysis is able to identify such life-cycle effects while controlling for cohort and period effects through a methodological innovation exploiting the first-derivative properties of the environmental concern function. Our main findings provide strong evidence of an inverted U-shape over the life cycle, which implies that substantial population aging in advanced economies may partially offset any generational shift towards a greater emphasis on protecting the environment.

Kyklos (Basel) 73(4) p. 477-499 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/kykl.12248

Does delegation of the budget preparation process to top civil servants improve or worsen fiscal performance? We address this question by analyzing high‐quality data on budgetary procedures and fiscal performance over a 25‐year period in Norwegian local governments. This long time period allows exploiting substantial variation in budgetary procedures across time and space. The results show that administrative delegation decreases fiscal deficits as a share of current revenues. Compared to procedures relying on political coordination or the traditional ‘bottom‐up’ procedure, deficits are approximately 0.3 percentage points lower on average under administrative delegation. Still, this effect is conditional upon the presence of minority governments and fails to materialize when the mayor enjoys majority support in the local council. Our results thus indicate that administrative delegation in budgetary processes may constitute an important tool to alleviate poor fiscal performance arising due to political coordination failures and weak political decision‐making.

Electoral Studies: an international journal on voting and electoral systems and strategy 60 p. 1-10 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2019.102050

Women have historically been underrepresented in democratic assemblies, particularly in top positions with executive powers. Most gender quota reforms address this by mandating a more equal gender representation on election lists. In contrast, a 1992 legislative reform in Norway required parties' candidate lists for the local executive board to comprise at least 40% politicians of each gender. This legal change was not only exogenously imposed by a higher-level government, but also generated distinct quota-induced constraints across Norwegian municipalities. We exploit the resulting variation in ‘quota shocks’ using a difference-in-differences design to identify the quota's effect on women's political representation as well as local public policies. We find that more women enter the executive board after the reform, though spill-overs on women's representation in the local council and on the probability of a female mayor or top administrator are weak. We also find no consistent evidence for shifts in public policies due to increased representation of women in positions with executive powers.

Health Services Research (HSR) 53(6) p. 4437-4459 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6773.12721

Objective: To examine the effect that the introduction of new diagnostic technology in obstetric care has had on fetal death. Data Source The Medical Birth Registry of Norway provided detailed medical information for approximately 1.2 million deliveries from 1967 to 1995. Information about diagnostic technology was collected directly from the maternity units, using a questionnaire. Study Design: The data were analyzed using a hospital fixed‐effects regression with fetal mortality as the outcome measure. The key independent variables were the introduction of ultrasound and electronic fetal monitoring at each maternity ward. Hospital‐specific trends and risk factors of the mother were included as control variables. The richness of the data allowed us to perform several robustness tests. Principal Finding: The introduction of ultrasound caused a significant drop in fetal mortality rate, while the introduction of electronic fetal monitoring had no effect on the rate. In the population as a whole, ultrasound contributed to a reduction in fetal deaths of nearly 20 percent. For post‐term deliveries, the reduction was well over 50 percent. Conclusion: The introduction of ultrasound made a major contribution to the decline in fetal mortality at the end of the last century.

The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 120(1) p. 3-30 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/sjoe.12229

We show that small shifts in representation can affect policy in proportional election systems. Using data from Norway, we find that a larger left-wing party leads to more property taxation, higher childcare spending, and lower elderly care spending, while local public goods appear to be a non-partisan issue. These effects are partly due to shifts in bloc majorities, and partly due to changes in the left–right position of the council, keeping the majority constant. The estimates on spending allocations are rather imprecise, but they are consistent with evidence on politicians' fiscal preferences and patterns in media attention.

Public Administration Review 78(2) p. 206-216 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12824

Despite the increasing stress on performance in public sector organizations, there is still little empirical evidence on whether—and if so, how—politicians respond to performance information. This article addresses this research gap by linking registry statistics on school performance in Norway's 428 municipalities with data from an information experiment embedded in a survey of local politicians. Findings show that school performance bears only a weak relationship to politicians' preferences for resource-related reforms, but it strongly affects preferences for governance-related reforms, indicating the importance of accounting for heterogeneity across alternative types of (school) reforms. Moreover, local politicians are, on average, well informed about school performance. This reflects the force of local inhabitants' high information level on politicians' accountability.

Journal of Public Economics 152 p. 47-54 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2017.05.006

Recent research explores the effect of financial and career incentives on public-sector hiring processes and subsequent performance. The reverse relation between performance and bureaucrats’ compensation and turnover has received only limited attention. Due to the distinct features of public-sector organizations, bureaucrats are traditionally argued to require either permanent positions and fixed wages, or low-powered performance incentives. This article studies how the performance of top civil servants in Norwegian local governments affects their compensation and turnover. We thereby build on a unique new dataset over the period 1991-2014. Our results indicate that better performing top civil servants obtain a higher compensation and are less likely to be replaced. Nonetheless, these incentives remain low-powered in line with agency theory prescriptions.

Health Policy 121(9) p. 986-993 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2017.07.007

Little is known about how physicians and hospitals respond to the risk of being negatively exposed in the mass media. We assume that newspapers will cover events more closely in the areas where they have most of their circulation. Within such areas the likelihood of negative publicity increases. The research question is whether obstetricians respond to negative newspaper coverage by choosing the least risky method of delivery, i.e. Caesarean section. This was tested on a large set of data from the Medical Birth Registry of Norway for the period 2000–2011. The Registry contains detailed medical information about all deliveries, for both the mother and the infant. This set of data was merged with a set of data that contained information about newspaper coverage for the municipalities in which all hospitals were located. Altogether, more than 620 000 deliveries in 46 municipalities were included in the study. The data were analyzed using a hospital fixed effects regression. The main result was that newspaper coverage had a significant positive effect on the probability of having a Caesarean section. Several supplementary analyses supported the main finding. Altogether, our results indicate that obstetricians are sensitive to the risk of being exposed in the mass media. This is likely to be because obstetricians care about their reputation.

Helsepolitikkens faglige premisser p. 17-28

I denne artikkelen analyserer vi lokale folkeavstemninger om kommunesammenslåing. Det forventes at stor forskjell i folketall, inntektsnivå og politiske preferanser mellom kommuner vil gjøre sammenslåing vanskelig. Det foreligger data for 253 folkeavstemninger i den reformprosess som nå foregår. Mange kommuner har holdt flere avstemninger og har stilt spørsmål om flere alternativer. Analysen her baserer seg på forskjeller blant kommuner innen en aktuell sammenslåings-konstellasjonen og ser bare på symmetriske folkeavstemninger. Hovedresultatet er en positiv sammenheng mellom folketall og andel ja-stemmer til sammenslåing. Bekymringen for å bli overkjørt ser ut til å være større enn håpet om stordriftsgevinster for små kommuner. Analysen indikerer at politisk avstand betyr noe i tillegg – man ønsker ikke å bli styrt av et annet politisk flertall. Vi studerer også beslutningen om å holde avstemning og valgdeltagelsen. Små kommuner har høyere tilbøyelighet til å holde folkeavstemning. Små og rike kommuner innen konstellasjonen har høyere valgdeltagelse – de har mer å forsvare.

British Journal of Political Science 49(1) p. 257-278 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S000712341600048X

Health Economics 26(3) p. 352-370 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.3314

The aim of this study was to examine the effect that the introduction of new medical interventions at birth has had on mortality among newborn babies in Norway during the period 1967–2011. During this period, there has been a significant decline in mortality, in particular for low birth weight infants. We identified four interventions that together explained about 50% of the decline in early neonatal and infant mortality: ventilators, antenatal steroids, surfactant and insure. The analyses were performed on a large set of data, encompassing more than 1.6 million deliveries (Medical Birth Registry of Norway). The richness of the data allowed us to perform several robustness tests. Our study indicates that the introduction of new medical interventions has been a very important channel through which the decline in mortality among newborn babies occurred during the second half of the last century.

Public Administration 94(3) p. 769-788 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12262

It is often said that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. In this article, we assess whether this also applies to the design of public authorities' service provision. In particular, we evaluate whether revenue scarcity – as an indicator of fiscal stress – induces government outsourcing. In contrast to previous studies, we exploit arguably exogenous variation in local government revenue across time and space to derive stronger inferences on the role of revenue scarcity for outsourcing. Using data from Norwegian local governments covering the period 1995–2012, our main results indicate that a decrease in local government revenues is linked to more outsourcing of both infrastructure and support services.

Electoral Studies: an international journal on voting and electoral systems and strategy 44 p. 1-14 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2016.06.009

The influx of immigrants to Norway over the last decades is a large-scale natural experiment. This paper exploits municipal-level variations in the immigrant population (1977–2011) to estimate the causal effects on voter support for the right-wing, anti-immigration Progress Party. The results indicate that voters keep incumbents accountable for permissive immigration policies. Immigration from non-Western countries (Africa, Asia, Latin America) has increased electoral support for the Progress Party. However, the effects are quite modest and noticeable only in the initial phases of immigration. Survey data covering ten elections (1989–2011) indicate a similar development in anti-immigration attitudes. The primary immigration shock tends to burn out quite fast as people get direct experience of immigrants on a daily basis.

Public Choice 166(3-4) p. 315-333 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-016-0324-9

Political preferences of public employees differ from those of workers in the private sector. The former are more likely to vote for left-wing parties and orient themselves ideologically towards the left. This political cleavage can be understood as the result of occupational incentives, or alternatively, as ideological self-selection whereby individuals favoring government solutions seek employment in the public sector. We test the selection hypothesis by estimating the effects of public versus private occupational sector on political preferences before and after retirement. The data are from the Norwegian Election Surveys and cover nine national elections between 1977 and 2009. The research design addresses a series of cross-sectional data and the key challenge of endogenous retirement is handled with instrumental variables. Party choice, ideological orientation, and public spending preferences are shown to change following retirement, and former private and public employees converge. The results reject selection based on ‘hard-wired’ political preferences.

Electoral Studies: an international journal on voting and electoral systems and strategy 39 p. 117-128 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2015.05.002

Health Services Research (HSR) p. 1-14 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7573-7_162-1

Public Choice 161(3-4) p. 427-450 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0168-0

Lack of party competition may impair government efficiency. If the voters are ideologically predisposed to cast their vote in favor of one political party, they may reelect an underperforming incumbent. Party polarization may augment this effect since the median voter faces a higher cost of selecting a better, but ideologically distant incumbent. Alternatively, if the electorate is evenly divided between parties, polarization may induce parties to apply greater effort to improve their election prospects. The current paper analyzes efficiency in Norwegian local government. Efficiency has been measured by means of panel data on government service output over a ten-year period. Electoral dominance has been measured as number of elections where one party bloc receives at least 60 percent of the votes, measured over six consecutive elections. Party polarization is defined as the ideological distance between the two party blocs, and it is measured on basis of survey data on the ideological preferences of elected politicians. Lack of party competition reduces cost efficiency, the effect being stronger in governments where party polarization is large. These agency losses are greater in high-revenue municipalities.

Social Science and Medicine 105 p. 84-92 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.01.008

Birth weight is an important predictor of health and success in later life. Little is known about the effect of mothers’ education on birth weight. A few causal analyses have been done, but they show conflicting results. We estimated the effect of mothers’ education on birth weight by using data on a school reform in Norway. During the period 1960-1972, all municipalities in Norway were required to increase the number of compulsory years of schooling from seven to nine years. We used this education reform to create exogenous variation in the education variable. The education data were combined with large sets of data from the Medical Birth Registry and Statistics Norway. Since municipalities implemented the reform at different times, we have cross-sectional as well as time-series variation in the reform instrument. In the analyses, we controlled for municipality fixed effects, municipality-specific time-trends and mothers’ and infants’ year of birth. Using this procedure we found a fairly large effect of mothers’ education on birth weight. Increasing mothers’ education reduces the likelihood of low birth weight, even in a publically financed health care system. In interpreting these results it is important to keep in mind that we have examined only one channel, which is through birth weight, through which education may explain differences in health. There are other potential channels that should be explored by future research. In particular, it would be of interest to examine whether education has causal effects on the broader determinants of health, such as psychopathology, social capital and networks, and family stress and dysfunction.

Health Services Research (HSR) 49(4) p. 1184-1204 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6773.12153

European Journal of Political Economy 29 p. 259-271 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2012.09.004

A recurrent assertion is that aging will intensify age-related conflict over public budget allocation. If people are led by their self-interest, the young will prioritize public education services, while the elderly will demand better pensions and health-care services. Addressing this issue requires longitudinal survey data and estimation of age (life-cycle), period and cohort effects. Except for a few of studies based on US data, such analyses are non-existent. We use repeated cross-section survey-data for 22 countries. Respondents are classified into ten-year age-groups and birth decades, and we estimate a regression model explaining respondents’ public spending preferences. When period and cohort effects are taken into account, elderly people want less education spending, and more health care and pension spending. These life-cycle effects vary considerably between countries, but are generally quite small. Preferences also appear mostly unrelated to left-right party choice.

The Journal of human resources 48(1) p. 142-168 Doi: https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.48.1.142

Health Services Research (HSR) 47(6) p. 2169-2189 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6773.2012.01419.x

Public Choice 153(1-2) p. 205-213 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-011-9785-z

Representative democracy does not necessarily eliminate political corruption. Existing models explain the survival of rent-taking politicians by ideological divisions in the electorate and/or informational asymmetries. The current paper demonstrate that rent extraction can persist even if voters are fully informed and ideologically homogenous. We show that in such an environment, voters may gain by persistently reelecting a rent-taker that limits his rent extraction. Such an equilibrium occurs when voters and politicians do not discount the future too heavily, and the share of honest candidates is relatively small.

Politica - Tidsskrift for politisk videnskab 44(1) Doi: https://doi.org/10.7146/politica.v44i1.69936

BMC Health Services Research 11 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-11-267

Journal of Health Economics 30(1) p. 163-180 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2010.10.004

We address models that can explain why expert patients (obstetricians, midwives and doctors) are treated better than non-experts (mainly non-medical training). Models of statistical discrimination show that benevolent doctors treat expert patients better, since experts are better at communicating with the doctor. Agency theory suggests that doctors have an incentive to limit hospital costs by distorting information to non-expert patients, but not to expert patients. The hypotheses were tested on a large set of data, which contained information about the highest education of the parents, and detailed medical information about all births in Norway during the period 1967 to 2005 (Medical Birth Registry). The empirical analyses show that expert parents have a higher rate of Caesarean section than non-expert parents. The educational disparities were considerable 40 years ago, but have become markedly less over time. The analyses provide support for statistical discrimination theory, though agency theory cannot be totally excluded.

Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning (TfS) p. 525-548

Norsk statsvitenskapelig tidsskrift 26(4) p. 265-295

Beta – Scandinavian Journal of Business Research p. 38-58

European Journal of Political Economy 26(2) p. 222-234 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2009.11.010

The literature on intergenerational conflict and public budgets has shown that the demands of the elderly may crowd out educational spending. We extend this literature to take into account altruism within the family where individuals care about the welfare of family members. The conflicting claims to the public budget will reflect the political strength of age groups, but may also be influenced by whether middle-aged have children or elderly parents in the community. We investigate the role of family altruism using both survey data and demographic and local government budget data in Norway from 1992 to 2004. Family altruism matters for local government spending on primary education, but does not affect spending on old-age care and health services. The old must take care of their own interests themselves.

Beta – Scandinavian Journal of Business Research 38(1) p. 38-56

Det nære demokratiet : lokalvalg og lokal deltakelse p. 351-364

Health Economics, Policy and Law 4(1) p. 11-27

Public Choice 139(1-2) p. 5-19 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-008-9373-z

Norsk statsvitenskapelig tidsskrift 25(3) p. 219-236

Journal of Health Economics 27(2) p. 510-518

Dijkgraaf, E.; Gradus, R.H.J.M. (Eds.), The Waste Market: Institutional Developments in Europe p. 5-5

Tidsskrift for velferdsforskning

Magma forskning og viten 11(4) p. 28-33

Universitetsforlaget

Beta – Scandinavian Journal of Business Research p. 19-19

Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning (TfS) 48 p. 565-578

Journal of Health Economics 26(4) p. 721-741

Magma forskning og viten 10(5) p. 51-62

Public Administration 85(4) p. 1045-1058

Europe's Nascent State: Public Policy in the European Union, Essays in Honour of Kjell A. Eliassen , J. From & N. Sitter (eds)

European Journal of Political Research 45 p. 445-465

This article investigates the impact of party ideology on revenue politics. Theoretically, claims can be made that party ideology should matter for revenue policies. First, leftist governments are more favourable towards government intervention and a large public sector. To accomplish this, leftist governments need more revenue than bourgeois governments. Second, revenue policy is a redistributive policy area well suited for ideological positioning. However, the claim that party ideology does not matter can also be made since raising revenue is unpopular and politicians may shy away from new initiatives. Empirically, the question is unsettled. The article investigates the problem by looking at three revenue policy areas (income and property taxation, and user charges) in two countries (Denmark and Norway). The data used is from the municipal level, providing several hundreds of units to compare. The evidence favours the 'parties matter' argument, particularly in the Danish case.

Public Choice 127 p. 75-95

We offer an explicit test of these propositions based on data for Norwegian local government. Elected politicians and administrative leaders are more interested in consolidating when efficiency gains are large. Local revenue disparities and to some extent dissimilar party preferences are significant impediments to voluntary mergers. Additionally, smaller municipalities are often prepared to sacrifice some efficiency gain to remain independent polities.

Tidsskrift for Den norske legeforening (Tidsskriftet) 125 p. 2812-4

Tidsskrift for velferdsforskning 8(Årg. 8, nr 4) p. 215-225

Synspunkter på dagens kommunestruktur

Økonomisk forum p. 12-21

NOU 2005:6, Vedlegg 1

Nytt Norsk Tidsskrift (NNT) 22(Årg. 22, nr 3) p. 258-270

Tidsskrift for Den norske legeforening (Tidsskriftet) 125 p. 1357-1360

Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning (TfS) 46 p. 503537-503537

Samfunnsspeilet : Tidsskrift om levekår og livsstil 2

? 124 p. 358-361

Økonomisk forum 58 p. 32-37

Public Choice 119(3/4) p. 281-310

Tidsskrift for velferdsforskning 7 p. 78-89

Norsk statsvitenskapelig tidsskrift 20 p. 156-176

Konkurranseutsetting i kommunene

Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning (TfS) p. 509-546

Økonomisk forum 58 p. 36-42

? 124 p. 362-364

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European Journal of Political Research 42 p. 163-195

Norsk statsvitenskapelig tidsskrift 19 p. 308-333

Public Choice 110 p. 225-243

Norsk statsvitenskapelig tidsskrift p. 380-397

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Scandinavian Political Studies 25(4) p. 357-384 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9477.00076

Journal of Health Economics 20 p. 379-393

Sosialøkonomen 54 p. 42-49

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? 120 p. 3134-3139

? 3 p. 151-157

Health Economics 9 p. 447-461

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