Retail payment services 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic also affected figures in 2021, albeit to a lesser extent than in 2020. The number of card payments increased again, both in Norway and at physical points of sale (POS) abroad. The average number of card transactions per inhabitant in 2021 was 479, which is high in a global context. Most card payments, 78 percent, were made at physical payment terminals in Norway or abroad. More than four out of five of these payments were contactless. The remaining card payments were primarily related to online shopping. Online payments account for an ever larger share of card payments. The increase in online payments between 2020 and 2021 was 19 percent. On average, the annual increase for the past five years was 25 percent. Surveys show that almost half of online purchases were made using traditional card payments. The use of mobile payments is increasing rapidly and now account for one out of four online payments. Most online purchases are ultimately settled with a payment card, including when the primary method of payment is mobile payment, invoicing, or some other manner. Giro payments are used, among other things, to pay bills and transfer money between private individuals. For households, regular online banking payments are the most common giro payment. The number of instant payments has grown quickly in recent years and instant payments are now the most used giro payment. These are primarily person-to-person (P2P) payments on mobile payment platforms. The Bank’s surveys show that 4 percent of survey participants used cash in their most recent payment at a physical point of sale. This figure has remained stable since the outbreak of the pandemic in spring 2020. The numaber of ATM and POS cash withdrawals has continued to decline, albeit somewhat less in 2021 than in 2020. The value of withdrawals from ATMs has also continued to fall but the value of POS withdrawals has increased somewhat.publishedVersio

The Government Petroleum Fund : Annual Report 2001

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Norges Bank : Annual Report 2022

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Government Pension Fund Global : Annual Report 2017

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Higher policy rate will curb inflation

Introductory statement by Governor Ida Wolden Bache at press conference following announcement of the policy rate and publication of Monetary Policy Report 3/22publishedVersio

Norges Bank’s management of the Government Pension Fund Global

Introductory statement by CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, Nicolai Tangen at the hearing of the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs of the Storting (Norwegian parliament).publishedVersio

Norges Bank is raising the policy rate to bring down inflation

Introductory statement by Governor Ida Wolden Bache at press conference following announcement of the policy rate.publishedVersio

A bankruptcy probability model for assessing credit risk on corporate loans with automated variable selection

We propose an econometric model for predicting the share of bank debt held by bankrupt firms by combining a novel set of firm-level financial variables and macroeconomic indicators. Our firm-level data include payment remarks in the form of debt collections from private agencies and attachments from private and public agencies and cover all Norwegian limited liability companies for the period 2010–2021. We use logistic Lasso regressions to select bankruptcy predictors from a large set of potential predictors, comparing a highly sparse variable selection criterion (“the one standard error rule”) with the minimum cross validation error (CVE) criterion. Moreover, we examine the implications of using debt shares as weights in the estimation and find that weighting has a large impact on variable selection and predictions and, generally, leads to lower out-of-sample prediction errors than alternative approaches. Debt weighting combined with sparse variable selection gives the best predictions of the risk of bankruptcy in firms holding high shares of the bank debt.publishedVersio

Identifying the depreciation rate of durables from marginal spending responses

This paper presents a novel method to estimate the depreciation rate of durable goods using a combination of identified marginal and average spending shares. We apply our method to Chinese spending responses to disposable income changes induced by monetary policy in 2008-2009. The marginal spending response is 0.40. Durable goods make up about 45% of this marginal spending response. By combining this marginal spending share on durables with an average spending share of 14%, we estimate the annual depreciation rate of durables in China to be 0.16.publishedVersio

The downs and ups of mark-ups

Based on sectoral National accounts data and estimates of the implicit rental rate of capital, we calculate price mark-ups for 42 Norwegian industries for the period 1980-2019. The results indicate a broad-based increase in mark-ups over the sample period, with an average increase of roughly 20 percentage points. Taken at face value, the secular rise in mark-ups have added almost 0.5 percentage points to GDP inflation each year since 1980. As part of the analysis, we also trace out movements in factor shares. Our results indicate a widespread decline in capital shares, and more so than for labor shares. Hence, our findings cast doubt on factor substitution as an important explanation for the decline in the aggregate labor share and instead point to increased corporate market power as the main culprit.publishedVersio