1,720,980 research outputs found
More for everyone: The effect of local interests on spending on infrastructure
Full text linkA 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
Full text linkIs 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
Revealed and stated preferences for reliable commuter rail in Norway
Full text linkWe study the effect of travel time reliability on passenger demand using a rich data set on period tickets and train delays over time for commuter trips in the Oslo capital region in Norway. We estimate the relationship between delays and demand using origin-destination fixed effects, which controls for any unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity across stations. The results show a negative effect of delays on demand, but smaller than the effect implied by stated preferences. As a possible explanation for this, we consider a reverse causal relationship, where high demand causes passenger crowding which again results in more delays. Splitting the sample into trips that start at crowded stations within the city-zone and trips that do not, we find evidence indicating that crowding is biasing the estimates towards zero
The Impact of Electric Vehicle Density on Local Grid Costs: Empirical Evidence from Norway
Full text linkWhile a rapid shift towards electric vehicles (EVs) will contribute to reducing carbon emissions from the transport sector, there are concerns that uncoordinated charging of EVs might impose challenges for the local electricity grid. Our study is the first to investigate this empirically in a country-wide analysis, using data from the country with the highest market share of EVs, namely Norway. We present the regulatory framework in which Norwegian grid companies operate and discuss the possible impact of EV charging. Using panel data on 107 grid companies over the period 2008–2017, we then estimate the effect of local growth in EVs on local grid costs. We find that increases in EV stock are associated with increases in costs which are both statistically and economically significant. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in these results, where the effect on grid costs are higher for small grid companies in rural areas
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
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Analyzing the deeper motivations for nature-based tourism facility demand: a hybrid choice model of preferences for a reindeer visitor center
Full text linkWildlife interpretive centers may increase the attractiveness of natural areas for visitors, provide local employment and income, and channel visitors to reduce wildlife disturbance. However, interpretive center success depends on understanding visitor preferences. This is facilitated by integrated analysis of individual characteristics, such as attitudes and demographic factors, and situational characteristics, such as interpretive center features. The current study integrates these characteristics via a hybrid choice model estimated with multi-level structural equation modeling in the context of prospective visits to a wild reindeer center in Norway. Results indicate that interpretive preferences vary, with foreigners prioritizing guided options more highly than do Norwegians. Neither sample prioritized technologically-intense media options. Both samples prioritized avoiding negative effects on wildlife habitat, with foreigners prioritizing it more highly. Connectedness to nature predicted preferences for visiting the interpretive center over not visiting. Consistent with the value-attitude hierarchy, intrinsic values predicted these preferences only indirectly, via connectedness. Comparison of the hybrid choice model with a basic multinomial logit model highlights the benefits of including latent variables to understand the deeper structure of preferences
Company cars and household car choices
No full textTax systems that favour company cars for personal use could cause households to have more cars. It could also affect the choice of fuel type. We investigate the relationship between household car choices and access to a company car through a difference-in-differences design using Norwegian microdata. We find that access to a company car is associated with an increase in the total number of cars and the number of combustion-engine cars. For electric cars, the results are inconclusive. However, wage growth and access to company cars are also positively correlated. Therefore, we cannot interpret the difference in the number of cars between the treatment and control groups as a causal effect of the company car scheme, but as a correlation. Still, existing evidence on the income elasticity of car demand suggests that the increase in the number of cars is unlikely to be driven by wage growth alone.Company cars and household car choicespublishedVersio
Local Representation and Voter Mobilization in Closed-list Proportional Representation Systems
Full text linkWe investigate whether geographic representation affects local voting behavior in closed-list proportional representation (PR) systems, where conventional theoretical wisdom suggests a limited role of localism in voter preferences. Using detailed data on Norwegian parliamentary candidates' hometowns, we show that parties engage in geographic balancing when constructing candidate lists. However, because most districts contain more municipalities than seats, not all municipalities will ultimately see a local candidate elected. A regression discontinuity design applied to marginal candidates reveals that parties obtain higher within-district support in subsequent elections in incumbents' hometowns — novel evidence of "friends-and-neighbors" voting in an otherwise party-centered environment. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that represented municipalities often continue to have locally-connected candidates in top positions, in contrast to municipalities with losing candidates, and are more frequently referenced in legislative speeches. There is no evidence that unequal representation creates inequalities in distributive policies.acceptedVersio
Train Unreliability and Demand for Rail Freight Transport in Norway
No full textWe use a rich data set on long-distance freight trains in Norway to estimate the effect of variation in train unreliability over time on transport demand within a fixed-effect framework. The train services that we study carry high-value consumer goods and compete heavily with trucks. We find that if the share of substantially delayed trains increases by 10 percentage points, freight volume goes down by about 3 per cent. In contrast with evidence from passenger transport, we do not find that the demand elasticity with respect to reliability is lower than the one implied by stated preference (SP) studies.acceptedVersio
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