1,720,988 research outputs found
Road tolls in Norway
No full textThese data document historical toll gates, including locations, rates and other regulations, in the period 01.01.2005-31.12.2021. The data cover all known toll gates within Norwegian borders.
The data reveals that both the number of toll gates and the toll level has increased over time. In recent years, the discount for electric vehicles and other zero-emission vehicles has been reduced. Detailed historical data of this kind can be used to study a number of transport economic issues, for instance related to travel demand, Pigouvian taxation, electric vehicle incentives and distributional effects. We encourage those who are interested to use the data to contact us if you notice any errors or irregularities.</p
Local Favoritism in At-large Proportional Representation Systems
Get PDFPork barrel spending is typically attributed to the strategic behavior of political elites hoping to be electorally rewarded by voters residing in their districts. Such behavior is expected to depend on the incentives imposed by the electoral system. We estimate the causal effect of local representation in a closed list proportional representation system where individual candidates have no clear electoral incentive to favor their hometown. Using data from Norwegian regional governments, we still find a hometown bias. We document that municipalities with a representative on the regional council from the same party as the governor tend to obtain more funding for local investments. In an extension we show that citizens also tend to vote more often for parties with a governor candidate from their own hometown, consistent with an expectation of particularistic benefits. Both effects are driven by municipalities with below median population size
Replication Data for: A minute of your time: The impact of survey recruitment method and interview location on the value of travel time
No full textThis dataset contains backgroun data for a study testing the impact of survey recruitment methods and interview location on the value of travel time. Respondents recruited from an internet panel, an email registry, and in the field answered surveys, both while at home and while travelling, on how much they shorter travel times.
The dataset contains information on how much respondents valued travel time, whether or not they were currently travelling, how they were recruited, and other variables like yearly income, gender and age
More for everyone: The effect of local interests on spending on infrastructure
Get PDFA central question in political economy is whether decision-making in representative democracies is biased towards local public investments or other types of policies which have locally concentrated benefits. The model by Weingast et al. (1981) predicts that a legislature with members from different areas will spend more in total on local public goods when the geographic constituency of each member is small. I test this prediction using panel data on the 18 Norwegian regional councils, exploiting that the geographic allocation of regional council seats varies considerably over time. Consistent with the theory, I find robust evidence that investments in regional public roads are lower when many council members come from the more populated areas in the region. This gives a more direct test of the prediction by Weingast et al. (1981) than existing empirical evidence, which concerns the relationship between public spending and legislature size. I find similar but less robust results for the maintenance of existing roads
A woman's touch : The effect of gender on political priorities
No full textIn my thesis I discuss and investigate whether there is an effect of
politicians' gender on policy outcomes. The main part consists of an
empirical investigation of this question, using a rich set of panel
data on Norwegian municipalities.
In my empirical analysis I employ data on municipal budget shares
for eight different service sectors and the share of women in the
local council as well as various control variables. The data is from
the period 1972-1999. I argue that it is particularly suitable for
the subject of study because female representation in politics
increased rapidly in Norway during this period, partly due to
women's activism within the party system. This implies that the
changes in female representation it the local councils can be at
least partly considered as driven by forces outside of each
municipality.
Women in politics has been a popular subject of study in political
economics during recent years, and investigating gender differences
in politics is of high interest in itself, both from a political and
an academic point of view. However, my study is also related to a
central question in the field of political economics, namely whether
(or to what extent) politicians are able to pursue their own
interests when deciding on policies.
Theoretical models differ in their predictions of the effects of
party representation and politicians' personal ideology on policy
outcomes, and the evidence from empirical investigations is also
mixed. The traditional median voter theorem states that who
eventually gets elected does not matter at all for policies. Several
empirical studies lead to rejection of this 'full convergence'
hypothesis. I offer a brief introduction to the theoretical
discussion of this subject and a somewhat more detailed review of
the empirical literature, some of which focuses explicitly on female
politicians. I also review a few other studies which do not concern
female politicians but gender differences in politics more
generally.
A popular model showing that personal ideology could matter for
politics is the citizen-candidate model, developed contemporaneously
by Osborne and Slivinski and Besley and Case. Using a slightly
altered version of this model, I show that if the barriers facing
female candidates in the political system are lowered, this could
make it more likely that a women is elected. This could again lead
to different policy outcomes than when gender barriers are high,
even though voter preferences have not changed. At the same time,
the model shows that if voter preferences change towards a more
'female' stand on policies, this could yield higher support for
female candidates and ultimately affect the policy outcome. The
model hence shows the importance of separating between these two
effects.
My way of doing this in the panel data regression is to add a rich
set of electoral, demographical and socio-economic variables which
should pick up effects related to voter preferences. In addition, I
add municipality- and time- fixed effects (FE) to account for
unobservable characteristics of each municipality and factors which
change over time affecting the spending decisions in all
municipalities.
The regressions are carried out using Stata 9. My results show a
positive estimated effect of female representation in the local
council on the share of the budget devoted to childcare with a high
degree of statistical significance. This estimated effect does not
depend much on the choice of control variables, nor on the time
period of study. I also find a positive effect on the share spent on
culture and a negative effect on administrative spending, though
especially the latter is less robust. The estimated effects on other
purposes like for instance education and elderly care are either
statistically insignificant or highly unstable across
specifications.
The estimated effects are very small in magnitude. More precisely,
the results imply that a ten percentage point increase in the number
of women in the local council only leads to an increase in the
budget share spent on childcare of 0.08 percentage points. The
effect on cultural spending is of similar magnitude.
I argue that the robustness of the results to the inclusion of more
control variables could imply that there is not much of a problem
with omitted variables related to voter preferences. As argued
above, changes in female council representation are likely to be
driven by external factors and could hence be considered exogenous
in this setting. In an attempt to investigate this further, I try
estimating the model by two-stage least squares (2SLS) using the
introduction of gender quotation rules in the Norwegian Labour Party
as an instrument for the share of women in the municipality council.
Instrumental variables using gender quotation rules in other
political parties seem to be irrelevant.
Unfortunately, my instrument is to weak to give precise estimates of
the effects on local public spending, and the 2SLS results therefore
tell us nothing about the validity of the results from the
regression without instrumental variables.
The results from the ordinary fixed-effects regression hence stand
uncontested: Increased female representation in Norwegian local
politics seems to have had a positive impact on the composition of
local public spending. The most robust effect is found for spending
on childcare, which is a sector where we might expect there to be an
conflict of interest between women and men. This and the other
effects found are however very modest, possibly reflecting a large
degree of consensus rule in the Norwegian local democracy or heavy
regulation of local public spending by the central government
Explaining low economic return on road investments. New evidence from Norway
Get PDFIs regional policy to blame for the negative economic return on many road projects, or can road investments give value for money also in remote areas? In Norway, a large majority of planned road projects have negative net benefits according to cost-benefit analysis (CBA). In this paper, we point at geographic characteristics that can explain this, comparing Norway with its neighbors Sweden and Denmark. We then show econometric evidence that such factors also explain a substantial part of the variation in the benefit-cost ratio within Norway. Projects in areas that are far from the largest cities or have difficult topography have lower net benefits. This implies that there is a trade-off between economic efficiency and investing in roads in rural areas with difficult topography. We also discuss the role of road design requirements, decision-making processes and the electoral system for road investment policy
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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