October 9 and 10, 2008. Aud 6, Eilert Sundts building.
Nilanjan Banik from the Institute for Financial Management and Research, Chennai, India is visiting our center on June 11th. He will be presenting a paper on "Growth versus Development: The Case of Asia" (co-authored with Basudeb Biswas and Sanjib Sarkar). The authors build a social development index, incorporating the effect of growth on distribution of income, and they study how growth is affecting social development in fast-growing economies in Asia.
Public reporting of school performances is a feature of school accountability systems that are increasingly common across OECD countries. A new kind of school quality indicators were published for the first time in Oslo in November 2005, and received considerable media attention. Jon H. Fiva, a postdoctoral fellow at ESOP, and Lars J. Kirkebøen, researcher at Statistics Norway, investigate whether the housing market responded to the previously unknown information. If parents value high quality schools and the school performance indicators provided new information the housing market is expected to react accordingly.
The leading European Labor Economist, Steve Machin, is visiting ESOP. He gives a seminar Monday April 7 on Panics in the Streets of London - Police, Crime and the July 2005 Terror Attacks. Steve Machin is working at the University College London (UCL) and at the Centre for the Economics of Education and Economic Performance (at London School of Economics).
Erling Barth, Bernt Bratsberg, Torbjørn Hægeland, and Oddbjørn Raaum have examined the impact of performance-related pay on wage differentials within firms. The empirical contribution utilizes two recent Norwegian employer surveys, linked to a full set of employee records. Their study shows that introduction of performance-related pay raises residual wage inequality in non-union firms, but not in firms with high union density. Their findings suggest that even though performance-related pay appears to be on the rise, the overall impact on wage dispersion is likely to be small, particularly in European countries with strong unions.
The Belgian Economist Jean Marie Baland visits ESOP 1st to 4th April. Baland is a Leading Development Economist with influential contributions on Inequality and the Commons, and the Economics of Child Labor, Land Markets and Political Power.
In the work "King of the hill" Kalle Moene and Halvor Mehlum analyze a never ending competition between two parties, which may be political parties or business rivals, war lords or religious groups. The authors discuss how the stakes involved are affected when victory one period is a benefit in the next.
Working paper by Jo Thori Lind and Dominic Rohner: Standard models of electoral competition say that countries with many poor voters should have a high political pressure for increased redistribution. This seems not to be the case; in reality there is less redistribution than these models predict, and the level of redistribution is not highest in the countries these models predict. Jo Thori Lind, a postdoctoral fellow at ESOP, and Dominic Rohner, lecturer at University of York and ESOP network member, introduce a new mechanism that can account for this "redistribution puzzle", based on an unequal distribution of political knowledge.
1-2 positions as Research Fellows in Economics, SKO 1017, are vacant at ESOP (Centre for the study of Equality, Social Organization, and Performance) at the Department of Economics. Candidates for the vacant positions should have a research interest in areas such as comparative welfare state arrangements, mechanisms of social mobility, studies of institutional arrangements, forms of redistribution and labor organization. (Application deadline is expired.)
