No Child Left Behind: Universal Child Care and Children’s Long-Run Outcomes

There is a heated debate in the US, Canada and many European countries about introducing universally accessible child care. However, studies on universal child care and child development are scarce and only consider short-run outcomes. We analyze the introduction of universal child care in Norway, addressing the impact on children's long-run outcomes. Our precise and robust difference-in-difference estimates show that child care had strong positive effects on children's educational attainment and labor market participation, and also reduced welfare dependency. Subsample analysis indicates that children with low educated mothers and girls benefit the most from child care.universal child care, child development, long-run outcomes

Money for Nothing? Universal Child Care and Maternal Employment

The strong correlation between child care and maternal employment rates has led previous research to conclude that affordable and readily available child care is a driving force both of cross-country differences in maternal employment and of its rapid growth over the last decades. We analyze the introduction of subsidized, universally accessible child care in Norway. Our precise and robust difference-in-differences estimates reveal that there is little, if any, causal effect of child care on maternal employment, despite a strong correlation. Instead of increasing mothers’ labor supply, the new subsidized child care mostly crowds out informal child care arrangements, suggesting a significant net cost of the child care subsidies.universal child care, female labor force participation

Baby Booming Inequality? Demographic Change and Earnings Inequality in Norway, 1967-2000

In this paper, we demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are due to changes in the age structure. To this end, we use administrative data on earnings for every male Norwegian during 1967-2000. We find that the substantial rise in earnings inequality over the 1980s and into the early 1990s, is to some extent driven by the fact that the large baby boom cohorts are approaching the peak of the age-earnings profile. We further demonstrate that the impact of age adjustments on the trend in inequality during the period from 1993-2000 is highly sensitive to the method used: while the most widely used age-adjusted inequality measure indicates little change in inequality over this period, a new and improved age-adjusted measure suggests a decline in inequality.inequality trend, age structure, age-earnings profile, Gini coefficient

Broadband Internet: An Information Superhighway to Sex Crime?

Does internet use trigger sex crime? We use unique Norwegian data on crime and internet adoption to shed light on this question. A public program with limited funding rolled out broadband access points in 2000-2008, and provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables and fixed effect estimates show that internet use is associated with a substantial increase in reported incidences of rape and other sex crimes. We present a theoretical framework that highlights three mechanisms for how internet use may affect reported sex crime, namely a reporting effect, a matching effect on potential offenders and victims, and a direct effect on crime propensity. Our results indicate that the direct effect is non-negligible and positive, plausibly as a result of increased consumption of pornography.rape, sex crimes, instrumental variables, broadband, internet, pornography

Ranking intersecting distribution functions

Second-degree dominance has become a widely accepted criterion for ordering distribution functions according to social welfare. However, it provides only a partial ordering, and it may fail to rank distributions that intersect. To rank intersecting distribution functions, we propose a general approach based on rank-dependent theory. This approach avoids making arbitrary restrictions or parametric assumptions about social welfare functions and allows researchers to identify the weakest set of assumptions needed to rank distributions according to social welfare. Our approach is based on two complementary sequences of nested dominance criteria. The first (second) sequence extends second-degree stochastic dominance by placing more emphasis on differences that occur in the lower (upper) part of the distribution. The sequences characterize two separate systems of nested subfamilies of rank-dependent social welfare functions. This allows us to identify the least restrictive rank-dependent social preferences that give an unambiguous ranking of a given set of distribution functions. We also provide an axiomatization of the sequences of dominance criteria and the corresponding subfamilies of social welfare functions. We show the usefulness of our approach using two empirical applications; the first assesses the welfare implications of changes in household income distributions over the business cycle, while the second performs a social welfare comparison of the actual and counterfactual outcome distributions from a policy experiment.publishedVersio

CHARGING AND DETECTION OF MESOSPHERIC DUST WITH INSTRUMENT SPID ON G-CHASER ROCKET

The Smoke Particle Impact Detector (SPID) was flown on the G-Chaser student rocket that was launched from Andøya on 13 January 2019. SPID is a Faraday cup instrument with applied bias voltages to deflect the ambient plasma and a target area inside the probe designed to measure the dust particles by charge detection. The charging process of the dust particles in the detector is important for interpretation of the measurements and the influence of the charging models is discussed. Preliminary analysis of the SPID observations shows that ambient plasma and sunlight had an influence on the signals; further analysis is needed to retrieve information on impacting dust from the data

Nationality, rationality and misperception : building blocks of civil war and the effects of intervention

In this paper I intend to study the framework of civil war and the effectiveness of in-ternational intervention into intrastate violent conflict. My aim is to provide policy suggestions for international players seeking conflict management and to describe possible mechanisms that influence the intensity and the duration of civil wars. I pre-sent briefly theories of civil war and different forms of interventions, mainly from an economic and material perspective, and try to show essential aspects to effective in-ternational management of conflicts. In the first main part of the paper, I use a decision-theoretic model of a three-stage game to suggest how the parties allocate their resources to fighting and production, when these are drawn from a common pool. I show how the effect of exogenous fac-tors might change with the level of fierceness and try to show a condition for potential contracts of peace to be accepted by both parties. I propose reducing the imperfect information between the different parties as a key element to satisfy such a condition. Lastly, I consider the effectiveness of interventions in this framework. An important result in this part is how different conflicts and players may respond differently to third party involvement. In particular, the receiving party’s initial mili-tary strength and economic size are key characteristics. In my model, I show that from a conflict management point of view, the best strategy is to increase the differences in economic output and to strengthen the economically smaller party militarily. In the second main part, I consider negotiations between the two parties and show that all conflicts can be solved under full information. Under symmetric imperfect in-formation, I show how there exists no general sharing-rule between the parties which is truth revealing and on the budget. I therefore suggest international contributions in the process to establish credible expected punishment for knowingly disclosing false information, and show that third parties must contribute at least half of the expected future output of the country to achieve this. I wrap up the discussion by finding the optimal sharing-rule for a cost-minimizing third party, and by discussing the partici-pation constraint. Finally, I use a data set of civil wars after 1945 to insinuate the impact of different kinds of interventions in different types of conflicts. SPSS is used to calculate Pearson correlations between firstly the success of interventions and secondly the duration of conflicts and characteristics of the conflict and the interventions

Baby booming inequality? Demographic change and earnings inequality in Norway, 1967–2000

In this paper, we demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are due to changes in the age-structure. To this end, we use administrative data on earnings for every male Norwegian over the period 1967–2000. We find that the substantial rise in earnings inequality over the 1980s and into the early 1990s, is to some extent driven by the fact that the large baby boom cohorts are approaching the peak of the age–earnings profile. We further demonstrate that the impact of age-adjustments on the trend in inequality during the period 1993–2000 is highly sensitive to the method used: While the most widely used age-adjusted inequality measure indicates little change in inequality over this period, a new and improved age-adjusted measure suggests a decline in inequality

Eldre eller rikere? : en aldersjustering av tidstrenden i inntektsulikhet

Kombinasjonen av store barnekull etter krigen og en sterk sammenheng mellom alder og inntekt, vil kunne gi endringer i ulikhet uten at livstidsinntektene er endret. I denne artikkelen undersøker vi hvordan endringer i aldersstrukturen kan forklare trenden i inntektsulikhet i perioden 1967–2004 blant norske menn mellom 25 og 59 år