School lunch—Children’s space or teachers’ governmentality?

This article discusses social aspects of school lunches in Norway. How do 11‐year‐old students experience and perceive their packed lunches and lunch breaks and to what extent is the lunch break a space for children's sociality or an area for teachers’ governmentality? The study is based on 25 focus group discussions and drawing and writing assignments with 165 participants. A large proportion of the students expressed that they appreciated their packed lunches because they could decide for themselves what and how much to eat. Additionally, shortage of time and disturbance and noise in the classroom could ruin a good meal. The main issue that the students raised in relation to our question of sociality was with whom they could sit and eat their packed lunches. This finding underlines the importance of considering the emotional dimensions of eating and that commensal eating is not dependent on sharing the same food. The children experienced that the lunch break was governed by an adult agenda in which they had limited opportunities to create their own spaces.     

Customs brokers as intermediaries in international trade

Review of World Economics - Recent studies suggest that intermediaries like merchants facilitate international trade by reducing fixed trade costs for producers that trade through them instead of...     

Intertemporal Emission Trading with a Dominant Agent: How does a Restriction on Borrowing Affect Efficiency?

In this paper we analyze how restricting intertemporal trading by prohibiting borrowing of emissions permits affects the ability of a dominant agent to exploit its market power. We show that the monopolist could take advantage of the constraint on borrowing by not distributing the sale of permits cost-effectively across periods. Furthermore, we show that a constant present-value price over time does not imply a cost- effective distribution of abatement (permit sales) across periods.     

Gender-Equalizing Family Policies and Mothers' Entry into Paid Work: Recent Evidence From Norway

Universal parental leaves with job protection and earnings compensation increase women's labor market attachment, but very long leaves may have negative consequences at both individual and societal levels. Using panel data from the period 1996–2010, we study whether it is possible to offset the potential negative effects on women's labor supply of long parental leaves by policies targeted especially at fathers, and policies making formal daycare cheaper and more easily available. Norway is used as example, since all recent extensions in the parental leave scheme have been reserved for fathers and at the same time the daycare sector has expanded rapidly. We find that Norwegian mothers did enter work faster after childbirth in the late 2000s than a decade earlier. The latest initiatives may thus have contributed to a shortening of women's career interruptions and a more equal division of paid and unpaid work among parents.     

Is World Trade Becoming More Regionalized?*

The rise in intraregional trade shares and the proliferation of regional trade agreements does not necessarily mean economies excluded from those agreements are harmed. Trade data show that the share of each region's GDP that is traded extraregionally has been growing steadily following its fall in the 1930s. That is, the rapid growth of OECD countries' trade among neighbors has been accompanied by (albeit somewhat less rapid) growth in extraregional trade. This does not constitute proof that regional agreements benefit outsiders, but it at least throws doubt on the opposite conclusion.     

Factors Behind the Environmental Kuznets Curve. A Decomposition of the Changes in Air Pollution

The environmental Kuznets curve theory suggeststhat economic growth in the long run may reduceenvironmental problems. In this article, we usea decomposition analysis to isolate eightdifferent factors, in order to investigate theorigins of changes in emissions to air over theperiod from 1980 to 1996. Among these factorsare economic growth, changes in the relativesize of production sectors and changes in theuse of energy. Given constant emissions perproduced unit, economic growth alone would havecontributed to a significant increase in theemissions. This potential degradation of theenvironment has been counteracted by first ofall more efficient use of energy and abatementtechnologies. In addition, the substitution ofcleaner for polluting energy types and othertechnological progressions and politicalactions have reduced the growth in emissions.Consequently, the growth in all emissions hasbeen significantly lower than economic growth,and negative for some pollutants.The results indicate that policymakers mayreduce emissions considerably through creatingincentives for lower energy use andsubstitutions of environmental friendly forenvironmental damaging energy types, inaddition to support environmental friendlyresearch or to conduct direct emission reducingactions, such as abatement requirements orbanning of environmental damaging products.This is particularly relevant to countries andsectors with relatively high energy intensitiesand low pollution abatement.     

Safety regulation and monitor liability

We propose a simple liability rule when several agents are jointly responsible for monitoring a risky economic activity or certifying its security. Examples are safety controls for drugs or technical systems, environmental liability, or air safety accidents. The agents have private knowledge of their monitoring or avoidance costs. We adopt a mechanism design approach to ensure optimal monitoring incentives. Our innovation is to focus on information that is available or can be proxied when harm has occurred and when typically regulators and/or courts deliberate over fines and damages. By contrast, earlier proposals require more estimations of hypothetical accident scenarios and their ex ante probabilities. We argue that our rule promises substantial savings in information costs for courts and regulators and excludes likely sources of errors. Received: 11 October 2000 / Accepted: 14 September 2001 We are grateful to Doug Bernheim, Lewis Kornhauser, Kai-Uwe Kühn and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and discussions, and to an associate editor in particular for very valuable suggestions. Financial support from the European Commission (TMR Grant ERBFMBICT 972827) and from Thyssen Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.     

Market‐specific Sunk Export Costs: The Impact of Learning and Spillovers

Firms may face sunk costs when entering an export market. Previous studies have focused on global or country‐specific sunk export costs. This study analyses the importance of market‐specific sunk export costs (defining ‘market’ as a product–country combination). We also study how market‐specific export costs can be affected by various kinds of learning and spillover effects. We use firm‐level panel data for Norwegian seafood exports distributed on products and countries. The results lend support to the hypothesis of market‐specific sunk costs. We also find evidence of learning and spillover effects, particularly within the same product group.     

Trade barriers or trade facilitators? The heterogeneous impact of food standards in international trade

Recent research shows that the effect of food standards can be heterogeneous across sectors or countries: they sometimes act as barriers to trade, but in other cases may lead to increased trade. I present empirical evidence on Norwegian seafood exports showing that foreign food standards, measured by sanitary and phytosanitary notifications to the WTO, generally have a negative impact on total exports, the number of exporters and their average exports. However, for fresh seafood, there is a positive counteracting effect. I present a theoretical explanation for this, suggesting that food standards reduce consumer uncertainty about quality and safety and therefore increase demand.     

Firms’ export decisions—fixed trade costs and the size of the export market

This article presents a model of international trade under monopolistic competition. In the increasing returns sector firms face fixed, in addition to variable, trade costs, and both exporters and non-exporters may coexist. Exporters benefit from access to large foreign markets, thus a small country has a higher share of exporting firms than a large one. In contrast to standard models, the increasing returns sector will be more open in a small country than in a large one, and a small country may be a net exporter of such commodities, despite the disadvantage of a smaller home market.