A productivity study of the Norwegian building industry

Slow productivity growth in the building and construction industry is often put forward as the cause of rising building costs. In view of the importance of the building sector in the national economy, factual empirical knowledge is hard to come by. The few studies found are usually carried out on a sectoral level and based on time-series data. However, to come to grips with the real causes for slow productivity growth, one has to analyze at the microlevel of actual decision making. Our study is based on establishment data for 1986. The method of analysis is the deterministic frontier approach. The efficiency distributions show large variations with average structural efficiency about 20 percent. Thus, there is significant scope for productivity improvement if average performance can catch up with best practice.The refereeing process of this article was handled through T.G. Cowing.     

Budgetary Consolidation in Europe: Quality, Economic Conditions, and Persistence

In this article we study the importance of the quality of fiscal adjustments and macroeconomic conditions for the persistence of budgetary consolidations. In contrast to previous work in this area, we do not arbitrarily predefine a measure of persistence to evaluate consolidation “success.” By employing duration analysis techniques, the length of a consolidation spell is rather determined endogenously. Our results based on a sample of industrialised OECD countries show that “consolidation fatigue” and the quality of fiscal consolidations are indeed important determinants of their longevity. Moreover, high debt–GDP ratio and fiscal tightening in other OECD countries raise the likelihood of consolidations to persist. Applying our results to European countries in the 1990s provides only weak evidence suggesting that the Maastricht process contributed much to the fiscal consolidations observed in Europe during the 1990s. J. Japan. Int. Econ., December 2002, 16(4), pp. 512–535. ZEI, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; and CEPR; Strathclyde University, Glasgow, Scotland; and CEPR; and ECB, Kaiserstrasse 29, D-60311 Frankfurt a.M., Germany; and ZEI. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E61, E62, E65.     

Product and country substitution in imports: An empirical comparison of theoretical concepts

Product and Country Substitution in Imports: An Empirical Comparison of Theoretical Concepts. — The paper focuses on the shortcomings of current unit-values based measures for estimating product and country substitution in imports. The results of the bilateral index number technique in measuring changes in the country composition or product mix of imports were found to be inadequate, which was shown in an analysis of data on the French import market for chairs. An improved technique is briefly summarized, and its applicability compared with the bilateral index number technique. The new method performed accurately and provided a reliable basis for a refined analysis of changes within import markets.     

“Buy-back” in international trade: A rationale

Conclusion When a technology proprietor cannot exploit his advantage by means of ownership of a production facility abroad, a sales contract with “buy-back provisions” may, in fact, be a trade-enhancing resolution to a situation of information-asymmetry between buyer and seller. The important implication is that not all forms of countertrade can be summarily dismissed as inefficient. Just as foreign direct investment can be seen to be a response to environmental or market imperfections, “buy-back” may be a way to deal with institutional or regulatory obstacles such as the prohibition of foreign ownership.     

Static hedging and model risk for barrier options

The article investigates how sensitive different dynamic and static hedge strategies for barrier options are to model risk. It is found that using plain‐vanilla options to hedge offers considerable improvements over usual Δ hedges. Further, it is shown that the hedge portfolios involving options are relatively more sensitive to model risk, but that the degree of misspecification sensitivity is robust across commonly used models. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 26:449–463, 2006     

Efficiency and the production function

Journal of Economics -     

Regional integration in East Asia. From market-driven regionalisation to institutionalised regionalism?

Conclusions The analyses have shown that ESACs unprecedented emergence in world trade and capital transactions has been accompanied by a growing share of intra-area transactions. At least for the goods sector, the evidence is clear. Intra-area transactions grew faster than those to the rest of world, and the latter rose faster than world trade. Given this “double growth” performance, there was no trade diversion in the static zero sum meaning. Driving forces of fast growing intra-area transactions were basically internal conditions, such as “natural” trading partnership (geographical and cultural proximity, size, and complementarity in resource endowment and production structure), rising income levels fostering intra-industry trade, the economic opening of China, and unilateral liberalisation of trade and capital transactions on a non-discriminatory basis. It cannot be denied that external factors as protectionism and recession in non-Asian OECD countries have also contributed to this performance. Yet, it seems safe to assume that even without the US and European recession in the early eighties and early nineties and without the spread on non-tariff barriers, intraarea transactions would have received sufficient fuels from the internal factors to grow more rapidly than transactions with the rest of the world.¹⁷ Furthermore, a base effect of a low initial level of intra-area trade cannot be neglected.