This paper tries to convey the essence of the economic theory of behaviour of individuals and firms to an audience of non-economists. The hypotheses of utility and profit maximization and their use as building blocks in ...

A core question in the contemporary debate on distributive justice is how to understand fairness in situations involving production. Important theories of distributive justice, such as strict egalitarianism, liberal ...

Two wealth effects typically arise in any contest: i) wealth decreases the marginal cost of effort, but also ii) decreases the marginal benefit of winning the contest. In this paper, we introduce three types of strategic ...

The paper considers the history of theories of income distribution, from the time of Adam Smith until the 1970s. It is divided into two main parts. Part I considers the positive theory of income distribution, beginning ...

The present paper deals with Max Webers hypothesis on the linkage between protestant ethics and the development of capitalism and entreprenaurship. It does so by study industrial entrepreneurship the great Norwegian puritan ...

When acquiring information systems, public entities face a dilemma. On the one hand, they want to procure the system that best suits their needs, which often requires lengthy dialogues with vendors. At the same time, they ...

We examine the labor market consequences of an exogenous increase in the supply of skilled labor in several cities in Norway, resulting from the construction of new colleges in the 1970s. We find that skilled wages ...

Can a tiny gain to sufficiently many well-off justify imposing a much larger sacrifice on the worst-off? We show that if one answers negatively to such a question and endorses replication invariance, one is forced to accept ...

The paper gives an overview of some main themes in the theory of tax evasion, starting from Allingham and Sandmo (1972). It reviews the comparative statics of the original model of individual behaviour where the tax ...