Magne Mogstad

The American Economic Review Doi: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20220948

Review of Economic Studies 91(1) s. 476-518 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdad006

The Journal of human resources 59 Doi: https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.1222-12698R1

We study the costs associated with domestic violence (DV) in Norway by comparing outcomes before and after a DV report, using those who will be victimized in the future as controls. A DV report is associated with increased mental health diagnoses for both victims and their children and reduced financial resources. Victims experience marital dissolution, more doctor visits, lower employment, reduced earnings, and higher use of disability insurance. Their children are more likely to receive child protective services and commit a crime. Using a complementary regression discontinuity (RD) design, we find declines in children’s test scores and grade completion.

Journal of Labor Economics Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/733225

American economic journal. Applied economics 16(2) s. 318-358 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20210689

Journal of Finance 79(3) s. 2163-2194 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.13335

We study the effects of broadband internet use on the investment decisions of individual investors. A public program in Norway provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables estimates show that internet use causes a substantial increase in stock market participation, driven primarily by increased fund ownership. Existing investors tilt their portfolios toward funds, thereby obtaining more diversified portfolios and higher Sharpe ratios, and do not increase their trading activity in stocks. Overall, access to high-speed internet spurs a “democratization of finance,” with individuals making investment decisions that are more in line with the advice from portfolio theory.

Journal of Econometrics Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconom.2024.105718

American Economic Review: Insights (AER)

Econometrica 91(1) s. 53-60 Doi: https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA20460

In this comment on their paper, we first briefly summarize in Section 2 the most general framework for the problem that they consider. We then specialize their framework so as to highlight a connection (already noted by the authors themselves) to the multiple testing literature. By doing so, we facilitate a comparison in Section 3 with a closely related multiple testing problem considered in Mogstad, Romano, Shaikh, and Wilhelm(2020). Throughout our discussion, in addition to some key distinctions in the a symptotic framework employed in each paper, we emphasize two additional differences: differences in the choice of error rate for each multiple testing problem and differences in the way in which the θiare treated. In Section 4, we discuss the practical importance of these differences. To further emphasize what we feel are important distinctions in the interpretation of the results provided by the two methods, we cast this discussion in the context of the aforementioned teacher value-added example

Quarterly Journal of Economics 139(2) s. 1321-1395 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjad053

The American Economic Review 112(1) s. 169-212 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20190790

We quantify the importance of imperfect competition in the US labor market by estimating the size of labor market rents earned by American firms and workers. We construct a matched employeremployee panel dataset by combining the universe of US business and worker tax records for the period 2001–2015. Using this panel data, we identify and estimate an equilibrium model of the labor market with two-sided heterogeneity where workers view firms as imperfect substitutes because of heterogeneous preferences over nonwage job characteristics. The model allows us to draw inference about imperfect competition, worker sorting, compensating differentials, and rent sharing.

American economic journal. Applied economics 14(1) s. 133-163 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20190589

We examine how the adoption of information communication technology affects bilateral trade. The context is a public program in Norway that rolled out broadband access points leading to plausibly exogenous variation in the availability and adoption of broadband by firms. We find that broadband makes trade patterns more sensitive to distance and economic size. These results are consistent with a model of trade with variable elasticity of demand. The model predicts that adoption of a technology that lowers information frictions enlarges the choice set of exporters and importers. This makes demand more elastic with respect to trade costs and thus distance.

AEA Papers and Proceedings 112 s. 630-634 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20221064

Journal of Economic Perspectives 36(4) s. 29-52 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.36.4.29

In this article, we document and discuss salient features of collective bargaining systems in the OECD countries, with the goal of debunking some misconceptions and myths and revitalizing the general interest in wage setting and collective bargaining. We hope that such an interest may help close the gap between how economists tend to model wage setting and how wages are actually set. Canonical models of competitive labor markets, monopsony, and search and matching all assume a decentralized wage setting where individual firms and workers determine wages. In most advanced economies, however, it is common that firms or employer associations bargain with unions over wages, producing collective bargaining systems. We show that the characteristics of these systems vary in important ways across advanced economies, with regards to both the scope and the structure of collective bargaining.

Journal of Labor Economics Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/720009

Journal of applied econometrics 36(6) s. 639-662 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.2832

Second-degree dominance has become a widely accepted criterion for ordering distribution functions according to social welfare. However, it provides only a partial ordering, and it may fail to rank distributions that intersect. To rank intersecting distribution functions, we propose a general approach based on rank-dependent theory. This approach avoids making arbitrary restrictions or parametric assumptions about social welfare functions and allows researchers to identify the weakest set of assumptions needed to rank distributions according to social welfare. Our approach is based on two complementary sequences of nested dominance criteria. The first (second) sequence extends second-degree stochastic dominance by placing more emphasis on differences that occur in the lower (upper) part of the distribution. The sequences characterize two separate systems of nested subfamilies of rank-dependent social welfare functions. This allows us to identify the least restrictive rank-dependent social preferences that give an unambiguous ranking of a given set of distribution functions. We also provide an axiomatization of the sequences of dominance criteria and the corresponding subfamilies of social welfare functions. We show the usefulness of our approach using two empirical applications; the first assesses the welfare implications of changes in household income distributions over the business cycle, while the second performs a social welfare comparison of the actual and counterfactual outcome distributions from a policy experiment.

Research Briefs in Economic Policy / Cato Institute

Do employees benefit from worker representation on corporate boards? Economists and policymakers are keenly interested in this question – especially lately, as worker representation is widely promoted as an important way to ensure the interests and views of the workers. To investigate this question, we apply a variety of research designs to administrative data from Norway. We find that a worker is paid more and faces less earnings risk if she gets a job in a firm with worker representation on the corporate board. However, these gains in wages and declines in earnings risk are not caused by worker representation per se. Instead, the wage premium and reduced earnings risk reflect that firms with worker representation are likely to be larger and unionized, and that larger and unionized firms tend to both pay a premium and provide better insurance to workers against fluctuations in firm performance. Conditional on the firm’s size and unionization rate, worker representation has little if any effect. Taken together, these findings suggest that while workers may indeed benefit from being employed in firms with worker representation, they would not benefit from legislation mandating worker representation on corporate boards.

Review of Economic Studies 88(2) s. 643-688 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdaa062

We examine how many and what kind of firms ultimately rely on foreign inputs, sell to foreign markets, and are affected by trade shocks. To capture that firms can trade indirectly by buying from or selling to domestic firms that import or export, we use Belgian data with information on both domestic firm-to-firm sales and foreign trade transactions. We find that most firms use a lot of foreign inputs, but only a small number of firms show that dependence through direct imports. While direct exporters are rare, a majority of firms are indirectly exporting. In most firms, however, indirect export is quantitatively modest, and sales at home are the key source of revenue. We show that what matters for the transmission of foreign demand shocks to a firm’s revenue is how much the firm ultimately sells to foreign markets, not whether these sales are from direct or indirect export.

Journal of Political Economy 129(3) s. 703-756 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/712446

We show that family background matters significantly for children’s accumulation of wealth and investor behavior as adults, even when removing the genetic connection between children and the parents raising them. The analysis is made possible by linking Korean-born children who were adopted at infancy by Norwegian parents to a population panel data set with detailed information on wealth and socio-economic characteristics. The mechanism by which these Korean- Norwegian adoptees were assigned to adoptive families is known and effectively random. This mechanism allows us to estimate the causal effects from an adoptee being raised in one type of family versus another.

Journal of Labor Economics 39(4) Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/713009

We study the impacts of a major reform to vocational secondary education that aimed to move beyond the trade-off between providing occupational skills and closing off academic opportunities. Norway’s Reform 94 integrated more general education into the vocational track, offered vocational students a pathway to college, and increased access to apprenticeships. We identify reform impacts through a difference-in-discontinuity research design applied to linked population registries. The reform substantially increased initial vocational enrollment, but with divergent consequences by gender. Overall, the reform succeeded at improving social mobility, particularly for disadvantaged men, but it somewhat exacerbated the gender gap in adult earnings.

Journal of the American Statistical Association 116(536) s. 1804-1816 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.2021.1979562

The synthetic control (SC) method is widely used in comparative case studies to adjust for differences in pretreatment characteristics. SC limits extrapolation bias at the potential expense of interpolation bias, whereas traditional matching estimators have the opposite properties. This complementarity motives us to propose a matching and synthetic control (or MASC) estimator as a model averaging estimator that combines the standard SC and matching estimators. We show how to use a rolling-origin cross-validation procedure to train the MASC to resolve tradeoffs between interpolation and extrapolation bias. We use a series of empirically based placebo and Monte Carlo simulations to shed light on when the SC, matching, MASC and penalized SC estimators do (and do not) perform well. Then, we apply these estimators to examine the economic costs of conflicts in the context of Spain.

The American Economic Review 111(11) s. 3663-3698 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20190221

Empirical researchers often combine multiple instrumental variables (IVs) for a single treatment using two-stage least squares (2SLS). When treatment effects are heterogeneous, a common justification for including multiple IVs is that the 2SLS estimand can be given a causal interpretation as a positively weighted average of local average treatment effects (LATEs). This justification requires the well-known monotonicity condition. However, we show that with more than one instrument, this condition can only be satisfied if choice behavior is effectively homogeneous. Based on this finding, we consider the use of multiple IVs under a weaker, partial monotonicity condition. We characterize empirically verifiable sufficient and necessary conditions for the 2SLS estimand to be a positively weighted average of LATEs under partial monotonicity. We apply these results to an empirical analysis of the returns to college with multiple instruments. We show that the standard monotonicity condition is at odds with the data. Nevertheless, our empirical checks reveal that the 2SLS estimate retains a causal interpretation as a positively weighted average of the effects of college attendance among complier groups.

Journal of Public Economics Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104163

A major difficulty faced by researchers who want to study the consumption and savings behavior of households is the lack of reliable panel data on household expenditures. One possibility is to use surveys that follow the same households over time, but such data are rare and they typically have small sample sizes and face significant measurement issues. An alternative approach is to use the accounting identity that total household spending is equal to income plus capital gains minus the change in wealth over the period. The goal of this paper is to examine the advantages and difficulties of using this accounting identity to construct a population panel data with information on household expenditure. To derive such measures of consumption expenditure, we combine several data sources from Norway over the period 1994–2014.

The American Economic Review 109(7) s. 2613-2654 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20151231

There is no evaluation of the consequences of Disability Insurance (DI) receipt that captures the effects on households' net income and consumption expenditure, family labor supply, or benefits from other programs. Combining detailed register data from Norway with an instrumental variables approach based on random assignment to appellant judges, we comprehensively assess how DI receipt affects these understudied outcomes. To consider the welfare implications of the findings from this instrumental variables approach, we estimate a dynamic model of household behavior that translates employment, reapplication, and savings decisions into revealed preferences for leisure and consumption. The model-based results suggest that on average, the willingness to pay for DI receipt is positive and sizable. Because spousal labor supply strongly buffers the household income and consumption effects of DI allowances, the estimated willingness to pay for DI receipt is smaller for married than single applicants.

Journal of Political Economy 128(4) s. 1269-1324 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/705330

Using a random judge design and panel data from Norway, we estimate that imprisonment discourages further criminal behavior, with reoffense probabilities falling by 29 percentage points and criminal charges dropping by 11 over a 5-year period. Ordinary least squares mistakenly reaches the opposite conclusion. The decline is driven by individuals not working prior to incarceration; these individuals increase participation in employment programs and raise their future employment and earnings. Previously employed individuals experience lasting negative employment effects. These findings demonstrate that time spent in prison with a focus on rehabilitation can be preventive for a large segment of the criminal population.

Journal of Political Economy 127(6) s. 2795-2835 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/702018

We use data from Denmark, Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States to document the degree of educational assortative mating, how it evolves over time, and the extent to which it differs between countries. This descriptive analysis motivates and guides a decomposition analysis in which we quantify the contribution of various factors to the distribution of household income. We find that assortative mating accounts for a nonnegligible part of the cross-sectional inequality in household income in each country. However, changes in assortative mating over time barely move the time trends in household income inequality.

Annual Review of Economics 10 s. 577-613 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-101617-041813

Instrumental variables (IV) are widely used in economics to address selection on unobservables. Standard IV methods produce estimates of causal effects that are specific to individuals whose behavior can be manipulated by the instrument at hand. In many cases, these individuals are not the same as those who would be induced to treatment by an intervention or policy of interest to the researcher. The average causal effect for the two groups can differ significantly if the effect of the treatment varies systematically with unobserved factors that are correlated with treatment choice. We review the implications of this type of unobserved heterogeneity for the interpretation of standard IV methods and for their relevance to policy evaluation. We argue that making inferences about policy-relevant parameters typically requires extrapolating from the individuals affected by the instrument to the individuals who would be induced to treatment by the policy under consideration. We discuss a variety of alternatives to standard IV methods that can be used to rigorously perform this extrapolation. We show that many of these approaches can be nested as special cases of a general framework that embraces the possibility of partial identification.

Journal of Public Economics 180 s. 1-22 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2018.09.015

Econometrica 86(5) s. 1589-1619 Doi: https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA15463

We propose a method for using instrumental variables (IV) to draw inference about causal effects for individuals other than those affected by the instrument at hand. Policy relevance and external validity turn on the ability to do this reliably. Our method exploits the insight that both the IV estimand and many treatment parameters can be expressed as weighted averages of the same underlying marginal treatment effects. Since the weights are identified, knowledge of the IV estimand generally places some restrictions on the unknown marginal treatment effects, and hence on the values of the treatment parameters of interest. We show how to extract information about the treatment parameter of interest from the IV estimand and, more generally, from a class of IV‐like estimands that includes the two stage least squares and ordinary least squares estimands, among others. Our method has several applications. First, it can be used to construct nonparametric bounds on the average causal effect of a hypothetical policy change. Second, our method allows the researcher to flexibly incorporate shape restrictions and parametric assumptions, thereby enabling extrapolation of the average effects for compliers to the average effects for different or larger populations. Third, our method can be used to test model specification and hypotheses about behavior, such as no selection bias and/or no selection on gain.

Journal of Labor Economics 35(4) s. 993-1030 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/692509

Using Norwegian population panel data with nearly career-long earnings histories, we provide a detailed picture of the causal relationship between schooling and earnings over the life cycle. To address selection bias, we apply three commonly used identification strategies. We find that additional schooling gives higher lifetime earnings and a steeper age-earnings profile, in line with predictions from human capital theory. Our preferred estimates imply an internal rate of return of around 11%, suggesting that it was highly profitable to acquire additional schooling. Our analysis reveals that Mincer regressions dramatically understate the returns to schooling because key assumptions are violated.

Journal of Political Economy 125(4) s. 985-1039 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/692712

Quarterly Journal of Economics 131(3) s. 1057-1111 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjw019

Quantitative Economics 7(1) s. 157-192 Doi: https://doi.org/10.3982/QE322

Review of Economics and Statistics 98(4) s. 655-670 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00602

Journal of Public Economics 127(July) s. 58-73 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2014.04.011

What do labor income dynamics look like over the life-cycle? What is the relative importance of persistent shocks, transitory shocks and heterogeneous profiles? To what extent do taxes, transfers and the family attenuate these various factors in the evolution of life-cycle inequality? In this paper, we use rich Norwegian population panel data to answer these important questions. We let individuals with different education levels have a separate income process; and within each skill group, we allow for non-stationarity in age and time, heterogeneous experience profiles, and shocks of varying persistence. We find that the income processes differ systematically by age, skill level and their interaction. To accurately describe labor income dynamics over the life-cycle, it is necessary to allow for heterogeneity by education levels and account for non-stationarity in age and time. Our findings suggest that the redistributive nature of the Norwegian tax–transfer system plays a key role in attenuating the magnitude and persistence of income shocks, especially among the low skilled. By comparison, spouse's income matters less for the dynamics of inequality over the life-cycle.

The Journal of human resources 51(4) Doi: https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.51.4.1014-6678R

We use administrative data from Norway to analyze how fathers’ presence affects the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment. Our empirical strategy exploits within family variation in father exposure that occurs across siblings in the event of father death. We find that longer paternal exposure amplifies the father-child association in education and attenuates the mother-child association. These changes in the intergenerational transmission process are economically significant, and stronger for boys than for girls. We find no evidence these effects operate through changes in family economic resources or maternal labor supply. is lends support for parental socialization as the likely mechanism.

Social Choice and Welfare 44(2) s. 217-230 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-014-0838-3

To gauge inequality in living standards, the distribution of lifetime income is likely to be more relevant than the distribution of current income. Yet, empirical studies of income inequality are typically based on observations of income for one or a few years. In this paper, we exploit a unique data set with nearly career-long income histories to assess the role of so-called life-cycle bias in empirical analysis of income inequality that uses current income variables as proxies for lifetime income. We find evidence of substantial life-cycle bias in estimates of inequality based on current income. One implication is that cross-sectional estimates of income inequality are likely to be sensitive to the age composition of the sample. A decomposition of the life-cycle bias into income mobility and heterogeneous profiles reveal the importance of two explanations that have been put forth to explain the disagreement between current and lifetime inequality.

Quarterly Journal of Economics Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjv028

The American Economic Review 105(5) s. 137-141 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.p20151063

Journal of Public Economics Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2014.04.007

Quarterly Journal of Economics 129(4) s. 1711-1752 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju019

The American Economic Review 104(7) s. 2049-2074 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.104.7.2049

The American Economic Review 104(2) s. 624-655 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.104.2.624

Review of Economic Studies 80(4) s. 1237-1266 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdt013

The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 114(1) s. 24-54 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9442.2011.01662.x

Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on cross-sectional data, a concern is that older is confused with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates wealth inequality due to age, yet preserves inequality arising from other factors. Using a new cross-country comparable database, we examine the impact of age adjustments on wealth inequality across countries and over time. We find that the most widely used method yields a substantially different picture of age-adjusted wealth inequality than our method.

The Stata Journal 12(3) s. 393-405 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1536867x1201200304

Income and wealth differ over the life cycle. In cross-sectional distri- butions of income or wealth, classical inequality measures such as the Gini, could therefore find substantial inequality even if everyone have the same life-time in- come or wealth. We describe the AG index (Almås and Mogstad, 2011) which is a generalization of the classical Gini index with attractive properties, and we provide the adgini command which provides the AG index as well as the classical Gini index. The adgini command provides options to produce other well known age-adjusted inequality measures, such as the Paglin-Gini (Paglin, 1975) and the Wertz-Gini (Wertz, 1977), and provides efficient estimation of the classical Gini coefficient.

American economic journal. Applied economics 4(2) s. 1-35 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1257/app.4.2.1

Nordic Early Childhood Education and Care – Effects and Challenges Research – Practice – Policy making s. 24-29

Journal of Public Economics 95(3-4) s. 193-204 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2010.11.023

Abstract In this paper, we introduce a new family of rank-dependent measures of inequality and social welfare consistent with the equality of opportunity (EOp) principle. The proposed framework can be used to measure long-term as well as short-term EOp, depending on whether we let permanent income or snapshots of income form the basis of the analysis. Furthermore, it allows for both an ex-ante and an ex-post approach to EOp. There is long-term ex-post inequality of opportunity if individuals who exert the same effort have different permanent incomes. In comparison, the ex-ante approach focuses on differences in the expected permanent income between groups of individuals with identical circumstances. To demonstrate the empirical relevance of a long-run perspective on EOp, we exploit a unique panel data from Norway on individuals' incomes over their working life span. This allows us to examine how well analysis of opportunity inequality based on snapshots of income approximate the results based on permanent income.

Demography 48(3) s. 1005-1027 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-011-0046-z

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 3(2) s. 97-129 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.3.2.97

Journal of Economic Inequality 9(4) s. 629-650 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-011-9168-1

In this paper, we demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are due to changes in the age-structure. To this end, we use administrative data on earnings for every male Norwegian over the period 1967–2000. We find that the substantial rise in earnings inequality over the 1980s and into the early 1990s, is to some extent driven by the fact that the large baby boom cohorts are approaching the peak of the age–earnings profile. We further demonstrate that the impact of age-adjustments on the trend in inequality during the period 1993–2000 is highly sensitive to the method used: While the most widely used age-adjusted inequality measure indicates little change in inequality over this period, a new and improved age-adjusted measure suggests a decline in inequality.

Journal of Public Economics 95(11-12) s. 1455-1465 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2011.05.016

Journal of Public Economics 94(9-19) s. 549-562 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2010.06.004

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 cash income are not necessarily appropriate when including noncash income, because the receipt of public services is likely to be associated with particular needs. In this paper, we propose a theory-based framework designed to provide a coherent evaluation of the distributional impact of local public services. The valuation of public services, identification of target groups, allocation of expenditures to target groups, and adjustment for differences in needs are derived from a model of local government spending behaviour. Using Norwegian data from municipal accounts and administrative registers we find that the inclusion of non-cash income reduces income inequality by about 15 percent and poverty rates by almost one-third. However, adjusting for differences in needs for public services across population subgroups offsets about half the inequality reduction and some of the poverty decrease.

Økonomiske analyser

Søkelys på arbeidslivet 26(3) s. 367-377

Barnefattigdom s. 140-162

Samfunnsøkonomen s. 1-19

Økonomiske analyser 28(4) s. 42-48

Comparative EU statistics on Income and Living Conditions: Issues and Challenges. Proceedings of the EU-SILC conference (Helsinki, 6-8 November 2006) s. 57-74

The purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion of two basic comparability problems related to the standard defi nition and measurement of income, with application to distributional assessments. First, we focus attention on how to deal with problems of measuring dividends and capital gains that arises when the income reporting behavior is affected by tax changes. The second issue discussed is concerned with comparability of incomes when there is signifi cant non-income heterogeneity between regions within a country. Empirical results based on Norwegian income data demonstrate the importance of accounting for comparability problems independent of whether they arise due to changes in the income reporting behavior of economic agents or are due to non-income heterogeneity in the population

Journal of Economic Inequality 5(1) s. 115-122 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-006-9024-x

An analysis of poverty based on a country-specific income poverty line suffers from disregarding regional differences in prices and needs within a country and may, therefore, produce results that give a misleading picture of the extent of poverty as well as the geographic and demographic composition of the poor. To account for differences in prices and needs, this paper introduces an alternative method for identifying the poor based on a set of region-specific poverty lines. Applying Norwegian household register data for 2001 we find that the national level of poverty is only slightly affected by the change in definition of poverty line. However, the geographic as well as the demographic poverty profiles are shown to depend heavily on whether the method for identifying the poor relies on region- or country-specific thresholds. As expected, the results demonstrate that an analysis of poverty based on a country-specific threshold produces downward biased poverty rates in urban areas and upward biased poverty rates in rural areas. Moreover, when region-specific poverty thresholds form the basis of the poverty analysis, we find that the poverty rates among young singles and non-western immigrants are significantly higher than what is suggested by previous empirical evidence based on a joint country-specific poverty line.

Steinar Holden og Knut Røed har et svakt faglig grunnlag for sitt forslag om å beholde den midlertidige ekstra arbeidsgiveravgiften.

https://www.dn.no/innlegg/ulikhet/ssb/forskning/innlegg-ssb-om-ulikhet-ulike-perspektiver-gir-nyanserte-svar/2-1-1218843

NBER Working Paper Series Doi: https://doi.org/10.3386/w29000

NBER Working Paper Series

NBER Working Paper Series Doi: https://doi.org/10.3386/w30447

NBER Working Paper Series Doi: https://doi.org/10.3386/w29549

BFI Working Papers 121

Memorandum from Department of Economics, University of Oslo

NBER Working Paper Series Doi: https://doi.org/10.3386/w27802

Memorandum from Department of Economics, University of Oslo

Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics

Almost one third of women worldwide report some form of physical or sexual violence by a partner in their lifetime, yet little is known about the mental health and well-being effects for either victims or their children. We study the costs associated with domestic violence (DV) in the context of Norway, where we can link offenders to victims and their children over time. Our difference-in-differences framework uses those who will be victimized in the future as controls. We find that a DV report involving the police is associated with large changes in the home environment, including marital dissolution and a corresponding decline in financial resources. A DV report increases mental health visits by 35% for victims and by 19% for their children in the year of the event, effects which taper off over time for the victim, but not for children. Victims also experience more doctor visits, lower employment, reduced earnings and a higher use of disability insurance while their children are more likely to receive child protective services and commit a crime. Using a complementary RD design, we find that a DV report results in declines both in children’s test scores and completion of the first year of high school.

NBER Working Paper Series

http://www.voxeu.org/

Discussion Papers

Reinhardt Lecture, Princeton University

North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society

Discussion Papers

Foredrag i Finansdepartementet

University of Zurich Empirical Micro Seminar

University of Edinburgh seminar

NBER Working Paper Series Doi: https://doi.org/10.3386/w29519

Global Priorities Institute Workshop

LSE STICERD, Applications Seminar

Tinbergen Institute seminar

Norwegian-German Public Economics Workshop

Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB)

Formålet med denne rapporten er å beskrive utviklingen i ulikhet i Norge i perioden 2001–2018. Rapporten beskriver ulikhet i inntekt og formue, fordelingen av skattebyrden og graden av progressivitet i skatte- og avgiftssystemet. I tillegg sammenlignes fordelingen av skattebyrden og progressiviteten i skatte- og avgiftssystemet i Norge med fordelingen av skattebyrden og progressiviteten i skatte- og avgiftssystemet i USA. Rapporten supplerer den offisielle inntekts-, formues- og skattestatistikken med ny informasjon om inntekts- og formuesfordelingen i Norge ved å sammenlikne målene for inntekt, formue og skatt som benyttes i offisiell statistikk med mer fullstendige mål for inntekt og formue. I målingen av inntekt inkluderes følgende tre inntektskomponenter som er utelatt fra inntektsmålene som benyttes i offisiell statistikk: (i) personlige eieres andel av tilbakeholdte overskudd i private selskaper; (ii) verdien av boligtjenester for boligeierhushold; og (iii) kapitalgevinster på bolig og annen fast eiendom og verdipapirer (unntatt aksjer). I tillegg belyser vi fordelingseffekten av verdien av kommunale tjenester ved å studere ulikhet i fordelingen av et utvidet inntektsmål som inkluderer verdien av kommunale tjenester. I målingen av formue benyttes et mål for boligformue som er basert på faktiske markedsverdier (observert i transaksjonsdata) i stedet for beregnede verdier fra skattemeldingen.

NBER Working Paper Series Doi: https://doi.org/10.3386/w28269

Penn State Economics of Education seminar

Western University Applied Economics/Econometrics seminar

Discussion Papers

Foredrag for Finanskomiteen - Stortinget.

Institute for Applied Microeconomics of the University of Bonn

CESifo Working Papers

NBER Working Paper Series Doi: https://doi.org/10.3386/w27368

NBER Working Paper Series Doi: https://doi.org/10.3386/w27807

BFI Working Papers

BFI Working Papers

It is often desired to rank different populations according to the value of some feature of each population. For example, it may be desired to rank neighborhoods according to some measure of intergenerational mobility or countries according to some measure of academic achievement. These rankings are invariably computed using estimates rather than the true values of these features. As a result, there may be considerable uncertainty concerning the rank of each population. In this paper, we consider the problem of accounting for such uncertainty by constructing confidence sets for the rank of each population. We consider both the problem of constructing marginal confidence sets for the rank of a particular population as well as simultaneous confidence sets for the ranks of all populations. We show how to construct such confidence sets under weak assumptions. An important feature of all of our constructions is that they remain computationally feasible even when the number of populations is very large. We apply our theoretical results to re-examine the rankings of both neighborhoods in the United States in terms of intergenerational mobility and developed countries in terms of academic achievement. The conclusions about which countries do best and worst at reading, math, and science are fairly robust to accounting for uncertainty. By comparison, several celebrated findings about intergenerational mobility in the United states are not robust to taking uncertainty into account.

BFI Working Papers Doi: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3656674

Memorandum from Department of Economics, University of Oslo 02

Invited Seminar at MIT

Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School of Business

NBER Working Paper Series Doi: https://doi.org/10.3386/w28269

University College London, Applied Online Micro Seminar

Discussion Papers

UAB Bellaterra Macro Seminar (w/applied)

Labor Lunch

CEMFI Empirical Micro Workshop

ASSA Conference

Cowles Seminar

Bristol Workshops on Economic Policy Interventions and Behaviour, June 17, 2019

Ca’Foscari University of Venice Seminar, June 10, 2019

CPB Workshop, June 11, 2019

NBER Working Paper Series

Empirical researchers often combine multiple instruments for a single treatment using two stage least squares (2SLS). When treatment effects are heterogeneous, a common justification for including multiple instruments is that the 2SLS estimand can still be interpreted as a positivelyweighted average of local average treatment effects (LATEs). This justification requires the wellknown monotonicity condition. However, we show that with more than one instrument, this condition can only be satisfied if choice behavior is effectively homogenous. Based on this finding, we consider the use of multiple instruments under a weaker, partial monotonicity condition. This condition is implied by standard choice theory and allows for richer heterogeneity. First, we show that the weaker partial monotonicity condition can still suffice for the 2SLS estimand to be a positively-weighted average of LATEs. We characterize a simple sufficient and necessary condition that empirical researchers can check to ensure positive weights. Second, we develop a general method for using multiple instruments to identify a wide range of causal parameters other than LATEs. The method allows researchers to combine multiple instruments to obtain more informative empirical conclusions than one would obtain by using each instrument separately.

UC3M A&E Seminar, June 7, 2019

University of Oslo Workshop on Inequality in Honor of Rolf Aaberge

Seminar at Bologna University

CESifo Conference. Economics of Education, Munich, 30-31 August 2019

UPF Labor/Public/Development Seminar Series

University of Oslo Workshop on Inequality in Honor of Rolf Aaberge

Discussion Papers

Discussion Papers

NBER Working Paper Series

High school vocational education has a controversial history in the United States, largely due to a perceived tradeoff between teaching readily deployable occupational skills versus shunting mostly disadvantaged students away from the educational and career flexibility afforded by general academic courses. We study the effects of a nationwide high school reform in Norway that aimed to move beyond this tradeoff. Reform 94, implemented in one step in the fall of 1994, integrated more general education into the vocational track, offered vocational students a pathway to college through a supplementary semester of academic courses, and sought to improve the quality of the vocational track through greater access to apprenticeships. We identify the impacts of the reform through a difference-in-discontinuity research design, comparing students born just before and after the reform’s birthdate eligibility cutoff to students born around the same cutoff in placebo years. Linking multiple administrative registries covering the entire Norwegian population, we find that the reform substantially increased initial enrollment in the vocational track, but with different subsequent outcomes for different groups. More men complete the vocational track at the expense of academic diplomas, but this has no detectable impact on college-going and leads to reduced criminal activity and higher earnings in adulthood, especially among disadvantaged men. For disadvantaged women, the initial surge in vocational enrollment leads to fewer high school dropouts and more vocational degrees with the college-prep supplement, and hence an increase in the share of college-eligible women; however, this translates into only small and insignificant increases in college completion and adult earnings. We show that men overwhelmingly pursue vocational education in higher-paying skilled trade fields, while women almost exclusively pursue vocational education in lower-paying service-based fields, which helps in interpreting some of these results. Overall, the reform succeeded at improving social mobility, particularly among men, but it somewhat exacerbated the gender gap in adult earnings.

Seminar at University of Lausanne

Labor and Public Economics Seminar

Seminar

BoI/CEPR/IZA Annual Symposium in Labour Economics 2019

CPB Workshop, June 12, 2019

NBER Working Paper Series

The primary goal of our paper is to quantify the importance of imperfect competition in the U.S. labor market by estimating the size of rents earned by American firms and workers from ongoing employment relationships. To this end, we construct a matched employer-employee panel data set by combining the universe of U.S. business and worker tax records for the period 2001-2015. We describe several important features of the U.S. labor market, including the size of firm-specific wage premiums, the sorting of workers to firms, the production complementarities between high ability workers and productive firms, and the pass-through of firm and market shocks to workers' wages. Guided by these empirical results, we develop, identify and estimate an equilibrium model of the labor market with two-sided heterogeneity where workers view firms as imperfect substitutes because of heterogeneous preferences over non-wage job characteristics. The model allows us to draw inference about imperfect competition, compensating differentials and rent sharing. We also use the model to quantify the relevance of non-wage job characteristics and imperfect competition for inequality and tax policy, to assess the economic determinants of worker sorting, and to offer a unifying explanation of key empirical features of the U.S. labor market.

Institutt for samfunnsøkonomi

Using quasi-random assignment of criminal cases to judges, we estimate large incarceration spillovers in criminal and brother networks. When a defendant is sent to prison, there are 51 and 32 percentage point reductions in the probability his criminal network members and younger brothers will be charged with a crime, respectively, over the ensuing four years. Correlational evidence misleadingly finds small positive effects. These spillovers are of first order importance for policy, as the network reductions in future crimes committed are larger than the direct effect on the incarcerated defendant.

Copenhagen Business School, Finance Seminar, June 7, 2018

Uppsala University, Labor Economics Workshop, June 3, 2018

the National Bureau of Economic Research

CAGE Seminars in Applied Economics, Econometrics and Public Policy, University of Warwick.

SciencesPO, Departmental Seminar

Norges Handelshøyskole

Understanding whether, and in what situations, time spent in prison is criminogenic or preventive has proven challenging due to data availability and correlated unobservables. This paper overcomes these challenges in the context of Norway’s criminal justice system, offering new insights into how incarceration affects subsequent crime and employment. We construct a panel dataset containing the criminal behavior and labor market outcomes of the entire population, and exploit the random assignment of criminal cases to judges who differ systematically in their stringency in sentencing defendants to prison. Using judge stringency as an instrumental variable, we find that imprisonment discourages further criminal behavior, and that the reduction extends beyond incapacitation. Incarceration decreases the probability an individual will reoffend within 5 years by 29 percentage points, and reduces the number of offenses over this same period by 11 criminal charges. In comparison, OLS shows positive associations between incarceration and subsequent criminal behavior. This Sharp contrast suggests the high rates of recidivism among ex-convicts is due to selection, and not a consequence of the experience of being in prison. Exploring factors that may explain the preventive effect of incarceration, we find the decline in crime is driven by individuals who were not working prior to incarceration. Among these individuals, imprisonment increases participation in programs directed at improving employability and reducing recidivism, and ultimately, raises employment and earnings while discouraging further criminal behavior. For previously employed individuals, while there is no effect on recidivism, there is a lasting negative effect on employment. Contrary to the widely embraced ‘nothing works’ doctrine, these findings demonstrate that time spent in prison with a focus on rehabilitation can indeed be preventive for a large segment of the criminal population.

Penn State, Econometrics Seminar, September 25, 2018

CReAM - Seminar in Applied Economics Series

CEPR/IZA Annual Labour Economics Symposium

Georgetown University, Econometrics Seminar

Norges Handelshøyskole

Using quasi-random assignment of criminal cases to judges, we estimate large incarceration spillovers in criminal and brother networks. When a defendant is sent to prison, there are 51 and 32 percentage point reductions in the probability his criminal network members and younger brothers will be charged with a crime, respectively, over the ensuing four years. Correlational evidence misleadingly finds small positive effects. These spillovers are of first order importance for policy, as the network reductions in future crimes committed are larger than the direct effect on the incarcerated defendant.

Empirical Micro Workshop

Imperfect Competition and Rent Sharing in the U.S. Labor Market", Banca d’ Italia, Seminar

The FAIR Inaugural Conference 18.-19. June 2018

Cornell University, Joint Labor Economics, Public Economics & PAM Workshop

World Bank, Research Department Seminar, September 13, 2018

University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics Seminar, June 5, 2018

Lund University, Seminar in Health, Labour and Family Economics

Department of Economics, University of Oslo

This paper studies how and why the adoption of information communication technology (ICT) affects bilateral trade flows. The context is a public program in Norway which rolled out broadband access points leading to plausibly exogenous variation in the availability and adoption of broadband internet by firms. We find that broadband internet makes trade patterns more sensitive to distance and economic size, and show that these results are consistent with a model of international trade with variable elasticity of demand and information frictions. Our findings shed light on the so-called “distance puzzle” in international trade.

NBER Working Paper Series

We propose a method for using instrumental variables (IV) to draw inference about causal effects for individuals other than those affected by the instrument at hand. Policy relevance and external validity turns on the ability to do this reliably. Our method exploits the insight that both the IV estimand and many treatment parameters can be expressed as weighted averages of the same underlying marginal treatment effects. Since the weights are known or identified, knowledge of the IV estimand generally places some restrictions on the unknown marginal treatment effects, and hence on the values of the treatment parameters of interest. We show how to extract information about the average effect of interest from the IV estimand, and, more generally, from a class of IV-like estimands that includes the two stage least squares and ordinary least squares estimands, among many others. Our method has several applications. First, it can be used to construct nonparametric bounds on the average causal effect of a hypothetical policy change. Second, our method allows the researcher to flexibly incorporate shape restrictions and parametric assumptions, thereby enabling extrapolation of the average effects for compliers to the average effects for different or larger populations. Third, our method can be used to test model specification and hypotheses about behavior, such as no selection bias and/or no selection on gain. To accommodate these diverse applications, we devise a novel inference procedure that is designed to exploit the convexity of our setting. We develop uniformly valid tests that allow for an infinite number of IV--like estimands and a general convex parameter space. We apply our method to analyze the effects of price subsidies on the adoption and usage of an antimalarial bed net in Kenya.

UIUC Applied Microeconomics Seminar

Universitetet i Bergen

Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB)

Strong intergenerational correlations in wealth have fueled a long-standing debate over why children of wealthy parents tend to be well off themselves. We investigate the role of family background in determining children's wealth accumulation and investor behavior as adults. Our research design allows us to credibly control for genetic differences in abilities and preferences and to identify the effects of exogenous changes in specific dimensions of family background. The analysis is made possible by linking Korean-born children who were adopted at infancy by Norwegian parents to a population panel data set with detailed information on disaggregated wealth portfolios and socioeconomic characteristics. The mechanism by which these Korean-Norwegian adoptees were assigned to adoptive families is known and effectively random. We use the quasi-random assignment to estimate the causal effects from an adoptee being raised in one type of family versus another. Our findings show that family background matters significantly for children's accumulation of wealth and investor behavior as adults, even when removing the genetic connection between children and the parents raising them. In particular, adoptees raised by wealthy parents are more likely to be well off themselves, whereas adoptees' stock market participation and portfolio risk are increasing in the financial risk taking of their adoptive parents. These intergenerational causal links are not driven primarily by inter vivos transfers or bequests. The detailed nature of our data allows us to explore other mechanisms, assess the generalizability of the lessons from adoptees, and compare our findings to results from behavioral genetics decompositions.

Samfunnsøkonomen 129(4) s. 26-27

Aftenposten (morgenutg. : trykt utg.)

Aftenposten (morgenutg. : trykt utg.)

Aftenposten (morgenutg. : trykt utg.)

Aftenposten (morgenutg. : trykt utg.)

Aftenposten (morgenutg. : trykt utg.)

Aftenposten (morgenutg. : trykt utg.)

Aftenposten (morgenutg. : trykt utg.)

Aftenposten (morgenutg. : trykt utg.)

Samfunnsøkonomen 128(9) s. 34-35

Institutt for samfunnsøkonomi

What do the education premiums look like over the life cycle? What is the impact of schooling on lifetime earnings? How does the internal rate of return compare with opportunity cost of funds? To what extent do progressive taxes attenuate the incentives to invest in education? This paper exploits Norwegian population panel data with nearly career long earnings histories to answer these important questions. We provide a detailed picture of the causal relationship between schooling and earnings over the life cycle, following individuals over their working lifespan. To account for endogeneity of schooling, we apply three commonly used identification strategies. Our estimates show that additional schooling gives higher lifetime earnings and steeper age-earnings profile, in line with predictions from human capital theory. These estimates imply an internal rate of return of around 10 percent, after taking into account income taxes and earnings-related pension entitlements. Under standard conditions, this finding suggests it was financially profitable to take additional schooling because the rates of return were substantially higher than the market interest rates. By comparison, Mincer regressions understate substantially the rates of return. We explore the reasons for this downward bias, finding that it is driven by Mincer’s assumptions of no earnings while in school and exogenous post-schooling employment.

Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB)

Why do individuals choose different types of post-secondary education, and what are the labor market consequences of those choices? We show that answering these questions is difficult because individuals choose between several unordered alternatives. Even with a valid instrument for every type of education, instrumental variables estimation of the payoffs require information about individuals' ranking of education types or strong additional assumptions, like constant effects or restrictive preferences. These identification results motivate and guide our empirical analysis of the choice of and payoff to field of study. Our context is Norway's post-secondary education system where a centralized admission process covers almost all universities and colleges. This process creates credible instruments from discontinuities which effectively randomize applicants near unpredictable admission cutoffs into different fields of study. At the same time, it provides us with strategy-proof measures of individuals' ranking of fields. Taken together, this allows us to estimate the payoffs to different fields while correcting for selection bias and keeping the next-best alternatives as measured at the time of application fixed. We find that different fields have widely different payoffs, even after accounting for institutional differences and quality of peer groups. For many fields the payoffs rival the college wage premiums, suggesting the choice of field is potentially as important as the decision to enroll in college. The estimated payoffs are consistent with individuals choosing fields in which they have comparative advantage. We also test and reject assumptions of constant effects or restrictive preferences, suggesting that information on next-best alternatives is essential to identify payoffs to field of study

Samfunnsøkonomen 128(6) s. 24-24

Barne -, ungdoms- og familie direktoratet

Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB)

When is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) more equal or better than another? This question has proven difficult to answer in situations where distribution functions intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker criteria than second-degree stochastic dominance. The conventional approach in empirical work is to adopt some summary statistics, with no explicit reason being given for preferring one measure rather than another. In this paper, we develop a theory for ranking distribution functions. Our theory offers a general framework to unambiguously rank any set of distribution functions and quantify the social welfare level of a dominating distribution as compared to a dominated distribution. The framework is based on two complementary sequences of nested dominance criteria. The first (second) sequence extends second-degree stochastic dominance by placing more emphasis on differences that occur in the lower (upper) part of the distribution. These sequences of dominance criteria characterize two separate systems of nested subfamilies of social welfare functions. This allows us to identify the least restrictive social preferences that give an unambiguous ranking of any set of distribution functions. We also provide an axiomatization of the sequences of dominance criteria and the corresponding subfamilies of social welfare functions. To perform inference, we develop asymptotic distribution theory for empirical dominance criteria where it is demonstrated that the associated empirical processes converge in distribution to Gaussian processes. The usefulness of our framework is illustrated with two empirical applications; the first assesses the social welfare implications of changes in household income distributions over the business cycle, while the second ranks the actual and counterfactual outcome distributions from a policy experiment.

Institutt for Økonomi Working Paper Series

CESIfO

Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Norges Handelshøyskole

This paper provides evidence on the returns to schooling in current and lifetime earnings. We use these results to assess the importance of life-cycle bias in earnings regressions using current earnings as proxy for lifetime earnings. To account for the endogeneity of schooling, we apply three commonly used identification strategies. Our estimates demonstrate a strong life-cycle bias, often exceeding the bias from assuming that schooling is exogenous. We also find that the cross-section estimates of the returns to schooling are highly sensitive to the age composition of the sample. They tend to increase with mean age, reflecting that higher educated workers experience more rapid earnings growth through most of the life-cycle. We further show that the returns to schooling in lifetime earnings are relatively low compared to what previous evidence based on cross-section data suggest.

CESifo

Norges Handelshøyskole

We demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are because of changes in the age structure. In particular, we explore the hypothesis that the substantial rise in earnings inequality since the early 1980s is driven by the large baby boom cohorts approaching the peak of the age-earnings profile. Using administrative data on earnings for every Norwegian male over the period 1967-2004, we find that the impact of age adjustments on the trend in inequality is highly sensitive to the method used: while the most widely used age-adjusted inequality measure indicates that the rise in inequality in the 1980s and 1990s is indeed driven partly by the baby boom, a new and improved age-adjusted measure indicates the opposite, namely that the rise in inequality was even larger than what the inequality measures unadjusted for age reveal.

Norges Handelshøyskole

Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on cross-section data, a concern is that one confuses older with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates wealth inequality due to age, yet preserves inequality arising from other factors. Using a new cross-country comparable database, we examine the impact of age adjustments on wealth inequality across countries and over time. We find that the most widely used method yield a substantially different picture of age adjusted wealth inequality than our method.

Institutt for samfunnsøkonomi, NHH

VG : Verdens gang s. 47-47

Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB)

Inequality: New Directions

Økonomisk institutt, Universitetet i Oslo

Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB)

There is a heated debate in the US and Canada, as well as in many European countries, about a move towards subsidized, universally accessible child care. At the same time, studies on universal child care and child development are scarce, limited to short-run outcomes, and the findings are mixed. We analyze the introduction of subsidized, universally accessible child care in Norway, addressing the impact on the long-run outcomes of children. Our precise difference-in-difference estimates show that child care had strong positive effects on children's educational attainment and labor market participation, and also reduced welfare dependency. 17,500 new child care places produces around 6,200 additional years of education. In line with these results, we find that children exposed to child care delay child bearing and family formation as adults. Subsample estimations by child's sex and mother's education suggest that good access to subsidized child care levels the playing field. A battery of specification checks support our empirical strategy.

Seminar

Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB)

Kommunene produserer tjenester innenfor forskjellige tjenesteytende sektorer, som administrasjon, utdanning, barnehager, helsestell, sosiale tjenester, kultur og infrastruktur. Variasjoner i pengebruken per innbygger innenfor disse sektorene skyldes at kommunene har forskjellige inntekter og bundne kostnader (utgiftsbehov) og ikke minst at prioriteringen i pengebruken er forskjellig. Ved å formulere og estimere modeller for kommunenes økonomiske atferd kan en oppnå verdifull innsikt om hvilken effekt hver av disse faktorene har hatt for observerte forskjeller i kommunes økonomiske atferd. Modellene som blir benyttet til slike analyser kan deles i to grupper og omtales som partielle og simultane modeller. Mens partielle modeller behandler sektorene hver for seg, tar de simultane analysene hensyn til sammenhenger som må gjelde på tvers av sektorene under bibetingelsen om at utgiftene pluss netto driftsresultat er lik inntektene. På grunn av budsjettbetingelsen som kommunene står overfor er ressurbruken i de forskjellige sektorene gjensidig avhengig av hverandre, noe som det blir tatt hensyn til i de simultane analysene, men ikke i de partielle analysene. Med bundne kostnader (utgiftsbehov) menes kostnader for å yte lovpålagte tjenester og innfri minstestandarder i tjenestetilbudet. Høyt utgiftsbehov kan enten skyldes høye enhetskostnader eller høyt behov/etterspørsel i befolkningen. For eksempel vil en kommune med relativt mange gamle over 90 år få høyt utgiftsbehov i eldreomsorgen. Utgiftsbehov i eldreomsorgen vil imidlertid også påvirke hvor mye ressurser som kan disponeres innenfor andre sektorer, som f.eks. utdanning.

Økonomiske analyser 22(4) s. 28-39

De tradisjonelle fattigdomsstudiene i Norge og OECD-landene er basert på landsspesifikke inntektsgrenser for fattigdom. Inntektene er da justert for kjøpekraftsfordelene ved å tilhøre et stort hushold med flere inntektstakere framfor et lite hushold med én inntektstaker. Inntektene og fattigdomsgrensene er imidlertid ikke justert for geografiske levekostnadsforskjeller. Geografiske kostnadsforskjeller medfører at personer som lever i økonomiske pressområder trenger høyere inntekter enn personer som lever i områder med lave levekostnader, dersom inntektene skal kunne finansiere samme kvantum av varer og tjenester. De tradisjonelle fattigdomsstudiene med landsspesifikke fattigdomsgrenser vil derfor underestimere antall fattige i områder med høye levekostnader og overestimere antall fattige i områder med lave levekostnader. I denne studien benytter vi både landsspesifikke og regionspesifikke fattigdomsgrenser, der regionene består av kommuner som er gruppert etter boligpriser og geografisk tilhørighet. Basert på en slik tilnærming viser resultatene på grunnlag av data fra 2001 at det er store geografiske variasjoner i anslaget på andelen fattige, både på fylkesnivå og kommunenivå. Oslo er det fylket i landet som har den høyeste andelen fattige, uavhengig om vi benytter en region- eller landsspesifikk fattigdomsgrense. Ved å benytte regionspesifikke fattigdomsgrenser reduseres andelen fattige i alle fylker utenom Akershus og Oslo, sett i forhold til det vi finner ved å bruke en felles fattigdomsgrense for hele landet.