Discussion papers (SAM): Recent submissions
Now showing items 161-180 of 658
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Household bargaining and spending on children: Experimental evidence from Tanzania.
(DP SAM;19/2017, Working paper, 2017-10)It is frequently assumed that money in the hands of women leads to better out-comes for their children than money in the hands of men. However, empirical and theoretical evidence are mixed. We conduct a novel between-subject ... -
What limits the powerful in imposing the morality of their authority?
(DP SAM;18/2017, Working paper, 2017-10)This paper models a game between an authority, seeking to implement its preferred morality, and a parental generation, seeking to socialize a younger generation into the their own morality. The authority chooses a coercion ... -
The Effects of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills on Migration Decisions.
(DP SAM;17/2017, Working paper, 2017-09)There is growing evidence that cognitive and noncognitive skills affect the economic and social outcomes of individuals. In this paper, we analyze how they affect the migration decisions of individuals during their lifetimes. ... -
War of attrition with affiliated values.
(DP SAM;16/2017, Working paper, 2017)We study the war of attrition between two players when the players’ signals are binary and affiliated. Our model covers both the case of common values and affiliated private values. We characterize the unique symmetric ... -
Samuel Pufendorf and Ludvig Holberg on Political Economy
(DP SAM;15/2017, Working paper, 2017)My interest in the history of economic thought goes several decades back. My studies in the Dano-Norwegian history of economic thought brought me to Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754). As many of you are aware of Holberg is known ... -
Exercise Improves Academic Performance.
(DP SAM;8/2017, Working paper, 2017-08)We report the results of a randomized controlled trial testing whether incentivizing physical exercise improves the academic performance of college students. As expected, the intervention increases physical activity. The ... -
The effect of school consolidation on student achievement.
(DP SAM;14/2017, Working paper, 2017-08)Many countries have seen a substantial increase in the average school size over the past decades, and a corresponding reduction in the number of schools. It has been widely argued that both students and local communities ... -
All-pay auctions with affiliated values
(DP SAM;13/2017, Working paper, 2017-08)This paper analyzes all-pay auctions where the bidders have affiliated values for the object for sale and where the signals take binary values. Since signals are correlated, high signals indicate a high degree of competition ... -
Talent Discovery, Layoff Risk and Unemployment Insurance
(DP SAM;11/2017, Working paper, 2017-08)In talent-intensive jobs, workers’ performance reveals their quality. This enhances productivity and wages, but also increases layoff risk. If workers cannot resign from their jobs, firms can insure them via severance pay. ... -
You’ve got mail: A randomised field experiment on tax evasion.
(DP SAM;10/2017, Working paper, 2017-06)We report from a large-scale randomized field experiment conducted on a unique sample of more than 15 000 taxpayers in Norway, who were likely to have misreported their foreign income. We find that the inclusion of a ... -
Going Fast or Going Green? Evidence from Environmental Speed Limits in Norway
(DP SAM;12/2017, Working paper, 2017-08)This paper studies the impact of speed limits on local air pollution, using a series of datespecific speed limit reductions in Oslo over the 2004-2015 period. We find that lowering the speed limit from 80 to 60 km/h reduces ... -
The gender wage gap in developed countries
(DP SAM;09/2017, Working paper, 2017)Despite the increased attachment of women to the labour force in nearly all developed countries, a stubborn gender pay gap remains. This chapter provides a review of the economics literature on the gender wage gap, with ... -
Navigating through torpedo attacks and enemy raiders: Merchant shipping and freight rates during World War I
(SAM;07/2017, Working paper, 2017)During World War I ocean freight rates rose to extraordinary levels. Using a new monthly dataset it is shown that freight rates can be well explained by economic activity, commodity prices, war risk and world tonnage in ... -
The merit primacy effect
(DP SAM;6/2017, Working paper, 2017)Do people give primacy to merit when luck partly determines earnings? This paper reports from a novel experiment where third-party spectators have to decide whether to redistribute from a high-earner to a low-earner in ... -
Euler Equations, Subjective Expectations and Income Shocks.
(DP SAM;05, Working paper, 2017-04)In this paper, we make three substantive contributions: first, we use elicited subjective income expectations to identify the levels of permanent and transitory income shocks in a life-cycle framework; second, we use these ... -
Seasonal Social Preferences.
(DP SAM;4/2017, Working paper, 2017-03)Christmas is when people are expected to act selflessly for the well-being of others, but are people actually more altruistic at this time of the year? Responding to this question poses a challenge because of the confounding ... -
Competition and physician behaviour: Does the competitive environment affect the propensity to issue sickness certificates?
(DP SAM;3, Working paper, 2017)Competition among physicians is widespread, but compelling empirical evidence on the impact on service provision is limited, mainly due to lack of exogenous variation in the degree of competition. In this paper we exploit ... -
Organizational Design with Portable Skills
(DP SAM;02, Working paper, 2017-02)Workers can move across firms and take with them portable skills. This has an impact on how firms are organized and allocate tasks across workers. To reduce mobility, a profit maximizing firm may inefficiently allocate ... -
Should the marginal tax rate be negative? Ragnar Frisch on the socially optimal amount of work.
(DP SAM;1/2017, Working paper, 2017-01-26)In the late 1940s, Ragnar Frisch published two articles in Norwegian that constitute a pioneering attempt to apply welfare economics to a problem of economic policy. The main contention of the articles is that there exists ... -
Intermittent Price Changes in Production Plants: Empirical Evidence using Monthly Data.
(DP SAM;22, Working paper, 2016-12)The price-setting behaviour of manufacturing plants is examined using a large panel of monthly surveyed plant- and product-specific prices. The sample shows a high frequency of zero changes, relatively small price changes, ...