Publikasjoner

In his article “The Allocation of Resources in the Presence of Indivisibilities,” Scarf points out that the major problem presented to economic theory by the presence of indivisibilities is the impossibility of detecting optimality at the level of the firm, or the economy as a whole, using the creation of profitability based on competitive linear prices. In the absence of such competitive prices, Scarf instead introduces a quantity test. Further development of the quantity test idea has lead to algorithms that are used to solve parametric integer programming problems. However, the quantity test is not a fully acceptable replacement of prices to analyse markets with indivisibilities. Recently, O’Neill et al. have suggested a new scheme that generates discriminatory equilibrium prices in markets with non-convexities. In this paper we elaborate this idea even further and use it to generate non-linear price functions that can be interpreted as a non-linear pricing scheme for markets with non-convexities.

The issue of finding market clearing prices in markets with non-convexities has had a renewed interest due to the deregulation of the electricity sector. In the day-ahead electricity market, equilibrium prices are calculated based on bids from generators and consumers. In most of the existing markets, several generation technologies are present, some of which have considerable non-convexities, such as capacity limitations and large start up costs. In this paper we present equilibrium prices composed of a commodity price and an uplift charge. The prices are based on the generation of a separating valid inequality that supports the optimal resource allocation. In the case when the sub-problem generated as the integer variables are held fixed to their optimal values possess the integrality property, the generated prices are also supported by non-linear price-functions that are the basis for integer programming duality.

I dette notatet har vi kortfattet utarbeidet en analyse av hjemmesidesatsingen blant de 32 kommunene i Hordaland og Hordaland fylkeskommune i 2004. Formålet med prosjektet har vært å få økt oppmerksomhet og interesse for e-forvaltning på kommunenivå. Vi har også vært opptatt av å drøfte hvordan kommunale hjemmesider kan være et bidrag til utvikling av lokalsamfunnene. Gjennom hjemmesideanalyser, noe informasjon fra nøkkelinformanter og informasjon basert på sekundærkilder, har vi laget en kortfattet oversikt. Her har vi forsøkt å finne ut hvor godt kommunene utnytter IKT-verktøyet knyttet til bruken av hjemmesider og nytteverdien av slike satsinger. Et seminararrangement med deltagere fra de undersøkte kommunene ble avviklet i tilknytning til prosjektet. Her formidlet ulike eksempler, og belyst områder med klart forbedringsmuligheter

Short Message Service (SMS) has been an overwhelming success in Europe, substantially larger than in the United States. In relative terms Norway represents one of the largest SMS markets in the world. The aim of the paper is to examine the relationship between economic theories of bandwagon effects, and the Norwegian mobile providers’ management of the SMS market. We narrow the focus to the problem of getting the SMS bandwagon rolling. We emphasize two features crucial to the SMS success. The first is low prices on text messaging relative to the mobile phone call charges for low-end tariffs. The second key feature is the high degree of interlinking with respect to both functionality and pricing. Both these features differ between Europe and the United States, and we argue that this might explain the difference in market development. In the SMS market the absence of regulations and ex ante superfluous functionality have ended up as ex post major successful services. This suggests that the regulator should be very careful when designing regulation regimes in bandwagon markets in order to avoid reduced innovation.

With implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, the Former Soviet Union countries, and Russia in particular, will most likely be able to exert market power in the emission permit market. However, it can be argued that since these countries also are big exporters of fossil fuels, their incentives to boost the permit price in this way may be weak. This paper argues that the effect on the permit price of the Former Soviet Union being a fossil fuel exporter is more ambiguous than that. A significant share of Russia’s fossil fuel exports is in the form of natural gas. A high permit price may boost the demand for natural gas through substitution from more polluting fuels (coal and oil) and thus increase gas profits. Therefore, being a natural gas exporter may in fact increase the incentives to exert monopoly power in the permit market. Moreover, a large fossil fuel exporter may use its market position to influence the effective demand for permits and thereby their price. Hence, the relationship between permit income and fossil fuels exports runs in both directions. We explore the interdependence between the revenues of the Former Soviet Union from permit and fossil fuel exports both theoretically and empirically. A numerical general equilibrium model finds that the fact that the Former Soviet Union is a big gas exporter has a negligible effect on the incentives to exert monopoly power in the permit market. However, there are significant impacts on the optimal level of gas exports. JEL classification: Q4, D58, L12, Q28, Q48. Keywords: Climate policy, natural gas, market power, emission permits.

Consider an auction in which potential bidders must sink an entry investment before learning their values, but where the auction designer can release information so that the bidders learn their values before entry. Such early information will induce screening of high-value bidders, and it will give rise to information rents and thereby a difference between the socially optimal auction and the auctioneer's preferred mechanism. Therefor, the auction designer has too weak incentives to produce early information. Early information may increase or reduce equilibrium entry. If entry is sufficiently reduced, early information will harm the auction designer.

A discrete-time stochastic bioeconomic model is developed and used to analyse the North Sea herring fishery under alternative management regimes. The analysis focuses on how catches and harvesting policies change with the price of herring. Two production functions are used to explain the harvesting process. At small stock levels, the choice of production function is seen to be critical for the model’s predictions. Feedback policies are found for the optimally managed fishery. The management of North Sea herring, after a moratorium was lifted in 1981, is evaluated with respect to effects on supply, stock level, and fishing effort. Under optimal management, the results imply that the fishery should have stayed closed until 1983, a conclusion that is independent of harvesting relationship used. Whether open access leads to total depletion or not is seen to depend on the choice of production function.

Despite substantial regional expenditures at both national and community level, European regional policies do not appear to deliver. The evidence suggests that neither efficiency gains nor reduced regional inequalities are attained. If there is any positive impact at all, then it is at the most a redistributional one. If transfers are mainly redistributional in nature, would policies based on non-distortionary financing be a better route to follow? We ask what are the alternatives to a distortionary regional policy forcing the delocation of activity. Are non-distortionary policies always more efficient than distortionary alternatives? We analyze these questions employing a new economic geography model, where we also take into account the importance of knowledge spillovers for productivity, industry location and policy. It is shown that the effectiveness of different regional policy depends on (i) intra-industry knowledge spillovers, (ii) inter-industry knowledge spillovers and (iii) trade costs. Our analysis provides insight into what may be the reason for the lack of success of EU regional initiative.

A milk marketing board (MMB) is a legislatively specified compulsory marketing institution, and a common way to regulate markets for dairy products. MMBs are based on price discrimination. As price discrimination leads to unequal profitability between products, receipts from sales are pooled and farmers receive a single price adjusted for composition and quality. It is well documented that price discrimination through MMBs incurs an efficiency loss to the society. Earlier contributions, Ippolito and Masson (1978) and Serck-Hansen (1979), point out that a particularly high loss is incurred if export of dairy products is included in the MMB. It proves difficult to find examples where this is the case. MMB countries are either large with a low export share in dairy products (USA and Japan), have economies of scale (Australia) or exports are excluded from the MMB arrangement (Canada). However, we find Norway to be a good example. Using a numerical model of the Norwegian agricultural sector we show that substantial efficiency gain may be achieved by deregulating the dairy sector, mainly due to the elimination of exports. It is estimated that a transition to cost based pricing may increase the economic surplus by NOK 1.5 billion, which is 26% of the production value. This computed gain from deregulation is far larger than for the other MMB-countries.

Markets for environmental externalities are typically closely related to the markets causing such externalities, whereupon strategic interaction may result. Along these lines, the market for Green Certificates is strongly interwoven in the electricity market as the producers of green electricity are also suppliers of Green Certificates. In this paper, we formulate an analytic equilibrium model for simultaneously functioning electricity and Green Certificate markets, and focus on the role of market power. We consider two versions of a Nash-Cournot game: a standard Nash-Cournot game where the players treat the market for Green Certificates and the electricity market as separate markets; and a Nash-Cournot game with endogenous treatment of the interaction between the electricity and Green Certificate markets with conjectured price responses. One result is that a certificate system faced with market power may collapse into a system of per unit subsidies, as the producers involved start to game on the joint functioning of markets.

The European business scene is dominated by the SME sector. One important characteristic of smaller SMEs is that they rarely have the resources to conduct accounting duties in-house. Consequently they often seek external assistance from accountants. Because of the ongoing cooperation the small firm accountant has with his/her clients, through the provision of basic accounting services, there is a potential for the development of the trust required to act as a business advisor As such small firm accountants have increasingly depicted themselves as multidisciplinary practices for an extensive array of business advisory services. Previous research indicates that there are substantial variations in the extent to which small firm accountants deliver business advisory services and substantial differences in the range of services they provide. It is these differences, and the reasons underlying them, that constitute the focus of this paper. Employing a resource-based perspective this paper analyses the main determinants of variations in the degree to which small firm accountants deliver business advisory services. These determinants include the strategic intention of the accountancy practice, its internal development focus and its external alliances. The data employed is derived from two recently collected samples of small firm accountancy practices in Norway and Scotland providing an opportunity to contrast the impact of two different statutory regimes.

This paper deals with the economic effects of the collapse of the Atlanto-Scandian and the North Sea herring stocks on the Norwegian fisheries. In the late 1950s the Norwegian winter herring fishery failed, and in the 1960s the entire stock of the Atlanto-Scandian herring collapsed. A few years later the North Sea herring stock suffered the same fate. Prior to these events, the herring fishery was the single most important fishery in Norway in terms of employment and landings. It was particularly important in western Norway, not least in the county of Hordaland, on which this paper focuses in particular. The immediate consequence of the collapse of the herring stocks was a severe decline in income and raw material for the processing industry. These difficulties were, however, overcome relatively quickly. The fishing fleet found substitute stocks, such as mackerel and capelin. The government took some measures for immediate employment relief, but over time redundant fishermen were absorbed into other industries, not least the emerging petroleum and fish farming industries. The time of the herring collapse was also a time of transition to a greater specialization in the labour market. Earlier, people had combined fishing with other occupations (farming, carpentry, etc.), but specialization on a single occupation became more and more common. This is likely to have made the adjustment to the herring collapse easier. The demise of the herring stocks in the 1960s and 70s is generally believed to have been the result of overfishing, which in turn was caused by major technological leaps (the power block, the asdic) enabling the fishing fleet to increase its catches by an order of magnitude. At the time there was no framework in place for international fisheries management to limit catches to what the fish stocks could bear. The herring collapses did, however, coincide with a change in ocean climate, so the causal relationship may have been more complicated. The technological changes which contributed to the herring collapse also made it easier to adjust to this event; the bigger and more powerful boats could be directed to fish stocks previously only lightly exploited due to distance and other factors making them less easily accessible.

In Norway, buy-back programs have been in force since 1979. Grants have been given to scrap fishing vessels or to sell them out of the country. These programs have been most successful for the purse seine fleet. Since the early 1970s the purse seine fishery has been controlled by boat licenses denominated as volume of cargo capacity. The government used the decommissioning grants in part to withdraw licenses and in part to stimulate accumulation of licenses on fewer boats, thus achieving both restructuring of the fleet and a reduction in total capacity. For many years the total cargo capacity of the fleet has remained roughly constant while the profits per vessel have increased. After a short break in the mid-1990s buy-backs were resumed. Since then the program has been mainly directed at smaller boats (shorter than 28 meters). The number of boats has declined substantially since the program was put into effect and the profitability of the fleet has trended upwards. The success of the buy-backs depends critically on measures being in place for preventing new boats from entering the fishery instead of the ones that have been removed. In the purse seine fishery this was accomplished through limiting the total cargo capacity of the fleet. For the so-called traditional vessels this has been accomplished through assigning fish quotas to certain groups of vessels and closing the entry to these groups. This scheme has now developed into individual vessel quotas (so called unit quotas) which can be bought and sold with the vessel. This system has greatly facilitated the restructuring of the vessel groups affected by this arrangement.

Norwegian spring-spawning herring (Clupea harengus) has been an important source of food for centuries, mainly for Norway, Iceland and Russia, but also for other European countries. Herring is a migratory fish stock, and during the last 50 years the migratory pattern has changed several times. There seems to be a connection between altering climatic conditions and the size of fish, yearclass strength and the migratory pattern. The distribution and the changing migratory pattern takes on significance for the international management of the stock. The changing judicial status of the herring has caused problems and conflicts between the parties involved in the fishery. Investigating whether the change is due to over fishing or to environmental causes, or a combination of both, was one of the objectives of the analysis. Furthermore, we have looked at the processes involved in finding solutions to the problem of managing straddling stocks.

This paper discusses the incentive compatibility of fish-sharing agreements based on zonal attachment of fish stocks. It is shown that the minor partner in a fish-sharing agreement may not have an incentive to cooperate unless he gets a larger share of the cooperative profits than his share of the stock according to the zonal attachment. This is particularly likely to happen when the unit cost of fish does not depend on the stock.

Agriculture at high latitudes is expected to be the main beneficiary of a man-made climate change. A numerical model, using Norway as a case, is employed to analyze the impacts of a warmer climate on northern agriculture. The computations indicate that the current degree of self-sufficiency can be achieved with 15% less budget support and higher economic welfare. However, it may be argued that environmental goods, such as landscape and biodiversity preservation, and settlement, are more important than self-sufficiency for northern agriculture. It is demonstrated that, in that case, welfare gains are substantially lower, and can even be negative.

Does fragmentation of production affect the trade patterns of different countries in similar ways? In contrast to current theories of vertical specialization, attempts to provide empirical evidence on this question have been based, in the vast majority of cases, only on a statistical analysis of trade flows. I propose a general equilibrium model of trade and fragmentation that allows me to capture the effects of vertical specialization on the export performances of different countries in individual sectors. It is a comprehensive framework, which combines comparative advantages (both of the Ricardian and Heckscher-Ohlin type) with other characteristics of the economies (sizes, market structure, investments in R&D) and takes into consideration the role of the employment of domestic and imported intermediates in the production of exported and non-exported final goods. The model is used to explain the differences in French and Japanese exports of manufactured goods (relative to US) toward other OECD countries over the period 1980-1994. In particular, the model highlights the propensity of France to vertically specialize its activities in order to fill possible gaps in terms of innovation and TFP, while the negative impact of fragmentation on Japanese exports shows a disinclination to use imported intermediates in the production of the exported goods.

Siden 1994 er maritime bedrifter solgt fra Norge til utlandet for omlag 44 milliarder NOK. Særlig rederiene opplever store endringer på eiersiden. Utenlandske eiere øker sjansen for at hovedkontorfunksjoner forsvinner fra Norge. Norsk maritim sektor er en næringsklynge med tette koblinger mellom de ulike delene. Rederiene har en viktig posisjon i denne klyngen. At rederiene forsvinner vil derfor kunne få uheldige konsekvenser for resten av næringen. Rederiene opererer i et internasjonalt marked og er svært mobile. Grunnen til utflyttingen er primært at norske rammebetingelser, spesielt skatteregimet, påfører rederiene konkurranseulemper. Globalisering, og lokaliseringskonkurransen den medfører, øker rederienes flytteincentiver. Maritim næring er en av de få næringene der Norge har en plass i verdenstoppen, og sektoren er en viktig bidragsyter til verdiskapning, sysselsetting og valutainngang. For å kunne beholde et høyt velferdsnivå må nedbyggingen av konkurranseutsatt sektor reverseres. Å miste maritim næring vil være kritisk for Norge.

Kina har de siste tjue årene hatt en uovertruffen økonomisk vekst. Samtidig er det tegn til at veksten ikke har kommet alle deler av landet til gode. I denne utredningen ønsker vi å undersøke om det finnes regionale forskjeller i Kina. Vi analyserer kort inntektsforskjellene mellom den østlige, sentrale og vestlige regionen. Deretter beskriver vi industrialiseringsmønsteret etter reformtidens begynnelse i 1978, med særlig fokus på ulikheter mellom provinser. Det er helt klare tegn til at industriene samler seg i et industrisenter langs østkysten. Til slutt vurderer vi så denne sammenhopningen av industri med utgangspunkt i core-periphery-teori, og finner at det er lite som tyder på spredning av vekst ifra Øst-Kina til de sentrale og vestlige områdene.

In this paper we analyze the interconnection incentives for two networks that differ with respect to size of their installed based. In the first part we prove that the smaller firm may be harmed in competition for new customers if the installed base customers pay a high price. In the second part we assume that the interconnection quality to customers in the installed bases is set before the interconnection quality to new customers. We show that both firms prefer perfect interconnection quality to new customers if the installed base interconnection quality is sufficiently high, and we discuss what policy implications this may have.