Equinor

Equinor grants funding to Norwegian universities and NHH through the Academia agreement. Researchers at the Department of Economics have received one grant from Equinor.

• Equinor

  Equinor

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Equinor: Macroeconomics and Natural Resources (2018-2024)

  Grant: 10 million NOK

  Summary: The project generated new knowledge on how the Nordic model and economic institutions facilitates efficient allocation of resources across firms. The project supported talented young researchers in macroeconomics and environmental economics and teaching activities related to these fields.

 

NFR Grants

The Research Council of Norway (NFR) invest in research and innovation through different portfolios. Researchers at the Department of Economics have received several grants from NFR.

• Childhood Gap, Parenting Styles and Lifetime Inequality

  Childhood Gap, Parenting Styles and Lifetime Inequality

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Childhood Gap, Parenting Styles and Lifetime Inequality (2018-2025)

  Grant: 8 million NOK

  Summary: An important and growing literature across many fields, has documented a socioeconomic gap early in life that grows into adulthood, and persists across generations. There is, however, a lack of scientific evidence of the causal mechanisms driving this. We aimed to investigate how much of the socioeconomic gradient reflects parental investments in children and children’s performance. First, we studied how parents’ investments in the human capital of their children depend on parents’ moral, time, risk preferences and beliefs, and how this affected children’s cognitive and non cognitive skills. Second, we used randomised controlled trials and natural policy experiments to investigate how and when one should target human capital formation in childhood and adolescence. Third, we aimed to identify causal effects of parents and higher educational institutions on the persistence of human capital accumulation across generations.

• Support for Network-Related Activities That Promote Scientific Development and Renewal Within the Center for Business Economics

  Support for Network-Related Activities That Promote Scientific Development and Renewal Within the Center for Business Economics

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Support for network-related activities that promote scientific development and renewal within the Center for Business Economics (2020-2024)

  Grant: 1.2 million NOK

  Summary: The project included networking activities aimed at development within the CBE Group which increased the spillover effect from research to education. The project mainly focused on measures which favoured the group as a whole, such as hosting guest researchers at NHH and increased support for PhD candidates both internally at NHH/CBE and nationally via courses for PhD students held by leading researchers within their fields. Access to leading researchers and conferences and workshops was beneficial to internal PhD candidates.

• Global Challenges, Sustainability and the Welfare State: Perspectives from Labour, Behavioural and Macroeconomics

  Global Challenges, Sustainability and the Welfare State: Perspectives from Labour, Behavioural and Macroeconomics

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Global Challenges, Sustainability, and the Welfare State - Perspectives from Labor, Behavioral and Macroeconomics (2020-2024)

  Grant: 1,5 million NOK

  Summary: The project was a collaboration between FAIR and the Macroeconomics, Risk and Sustainability Centre (MARSCe) at NHH. Together, we built a unique platform for labour, behavioural, and macroeconomists studying economic inequality, the financing of the welfare state, economic restructuring, drivers of macroeconomic cycles and economic policy, and the effects and challenges in a resource-rich economy. The key features uniting the two groups were the use of the rich administrative data in Norway and rigorous statistical methods to identify cause-and-effect relationships as well as the goal to provide research results that were highly policy-relevant. Bringing the micro and the macro perspective together provided novel partnerships to expand the research frontier and will be of great value for policymakers.

• Work Skills for Life: A Work Readiness Programme to Prepare the Transition from Secondary School

  Work Skills for Life: A Work Readiness Programme to Prepare the Transition from Secondary School

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Work Skills for Life: A Work Readiness Programme to Prepare the Transition from Secondary School (2020-2024)

  Grant: 6 million NOK

  Summary: In collaboration with the non-governmental organisation Femina Hip, this project studied the transition of students from secondary schools to the labor market in Tanzania, and tested innovative ways to improve it. The project, in addition to FAIR, involved researchers from Yale, IFS in London, ESRF in Tanzania and CISMAC at UiB.

• Successful Advances in Fiscal Architecture (SAFARI): Evidence from a New Tax in Zanzibar

  Successful Advances in Fiscal Architecture (SAFARI): Evidence from a New Tax in Zanzibar

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Successful Advances in Fiscal Architecture (SAFARI): Evidence From a New Tax in Zanzibar (2021-2024)

  Summary: We examined whether property owners were compliant with the new property tax, using administrative data. We also took a close look at whether the new tax caused fiscal externalities, exploiting the variation created by the gradual roll-out of the tax and comparing revenues from existing taxes between property owners who were subject to the new tax and property owners who were not.

  The project was led by Nadja Dwenger, Odd-Helge Fjeldstad, Ingrid Sjursen, Lucas Katera, and Vincent Somville. It was a collaboration between Chr. Michelsen Institute, NHH, REPOA (Tanzania), the Institute of Tax Administration (Tanzania), and the Zanzibar Revenue Authority (Tanzania).

• Reducing Inequality Through Complementarities in Investment in Education and Health

  Reducing Inequality Through Complementarities in Investment in Education and Health

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Reducing Inequality Through Complementarities in Investments in Education and Health (2018-2024)

  Grant: 8 million NOK

  Summary: The primary goal of the project was to analyse whether inequality could be reduced through complementarities in investments in education and health. Data from Norway and the US were used to study the dynamic processes through which multiple inputs interact in affecting the emergence or prevention of inequalities. The results will have important policy relevance both for Norway and other countries in developing cost-effective policies to address these inequalities.

• Women in Economics Network

  Women in Economics Network

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Women in Economics Network – Nettverksbygning innenfor samfunnsøkonomi (2019-2022)

  Summary: The Women in Economics Network (WomEN) is a platform for interactions among female economists with the aim to and promote gender balance in academic leadership positions. WomEN addressed two different issues to improve gender equality.

  1. Build a professional networking platform that increases the visibility of research projects led by women and helps recruit more women.
  2. Address individual challenges to limit the dropout rate of women.

• Childcare for Childhood and Business Development

  Childcare for Childhood and Business Development

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Childcare for Childhood and Business Development (2018-2022)

  Summary: The project focused on childcare in Uganda to free up time for mothers to have their own businesses. Could supporting pre-school education improve (i) educational outcomes for the children and (ii) business development for the mothers? These were the two key research questions in the project. Other studies have found that childcare has a positive impact on children's development and mothers’ employment decisions. No study, however, has explored these questions in Sub-Saharan Africa, and very few have used a randomised control methodology.

• Understanding Paternalism

  Understanding Paternalism

  Principal investigator

  Project: Understanding Paternalism (2017-2022)

  Summary: Understanding Paternalism provided a truly novel approach to research on paternalism, by providing unique experimental studies of paternalism that could enhance our understanding of what drives paternalistic policies and paternalistic behaviour in different spheres of society. 

• Fair Inequality and Personal Responsibility: The Nature of Inequality Acceptance

  Fair Inequality and Personal Responsibility: The Nature of Inequality Acceptance

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Fair Inequality and Personal Responsibility: The Nature of Inequality Acceptance (2016-2022)

  Grant: 1.2 million NOK

  Summary: The project addressed the following fundamental research question: What explains inequality acceptance? This question was studied from different perspectives and by the use of a number of empirical approaches, including novel incentivised experiments on nationally representative populations, lab experiments, survey experiments, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It was a truly multidisciplinary project that aimed at groundbreaking research. It  combined insights from economics, psychology, political theory, and philosophy, and combined structural and non-parametric empirical analysis with theory development.

• Intergenerational Mobility, Early Health Shocks and Public Policy

  Intergenerational Mobility, Early Health Shocks and Public Policy

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Intergenerational Mobility, Early Health Shocks and Public Policy (2015-2019)

  Summary: There is increasing evidence in the literature that external conditions during pregnancy and early childhood have persistent effects on children across many dimensions of outcomes in adulthood. This literature shows that differences in endowments at birth need not be genetic but instead are influenced by environmental factors while the fetus is in the womb. However, little is known about policy-induced variation in maternal and early-life health and about health shocks occurring to older children. While hospital access and well-child visits are considered to be an important factor determining the child mortality, only short-run outcomes of the introduction of clinics, providing care for pregnant mothers and their newborns, haven been studied. Our research aimed to fill these voids in the literature by matching existing administrative datasets to a number of new datasets, including information on specific birth month beginning in the 1920s, information on the timing and spread of diseases, and the implementation of programmes for maternal and neonatal care from the 1930s onwards.

• The Welfare State and Fairness in Markets

  The Welfare State and Fairness in Markets

  Principal Investigators

  Project: The Welfare Sate and Fairness in Markets (2014-2019)

  Summary: Almost all developed economies combine a market economy with a welfare state. Two essential roles of the welfare state are to handle inequalities created in markets and to provide insurance for market risks faced by individuals. The sustainability of the welfare state depends critically on its ability to fulfill these roles and to handle the potential trade-off between fairness and efficiency. This research project aimed to provide new knowledge about how people perceive fairness in a market setting and what is seen as legitimate ways for the welfare state to respond to inequalities and risks in a market economy.

• Fairness Across the World

  Fairness Across the World

  Principal Investigators

  Project: Fairness Across the World (2017-2018)

  Summary: In this project, we studied the fairness preferences, beliefs, and attitudes of 60,000 participants, covering 60 countries, in the Gallup World Poll 2018: Fairness preferences. Overall, the project provided a novel data set on the nature of inequality acceptance.

 

EEA Grants

The EEA and Norway Grants represent the contribution of Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway to reducing economic and social disparities and to strengthening bilateral relations with 16 EU countries in Europe. Researchers from the Department of Economics have received three grants from EEA since 2016.

• Quantitative Data About Societal and Economic Transformations in the Regions of the Three Baltic States

  Quantitative Data About Societal and Economic Transformations in the Regions of the Three Baltic States

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Quantitative Data About Societal and Economic Transformations in the Regions of the Three Baltic States During the Last Hundred Years for the Analysis of Historical Transformations and the Overcoming of Future Challenges - BALTIC100 (2022-2024)

  Summary: The project preserved quantitative data by creating a data repository reflecting social and economic transformations in the three Baltic regions over the last hundred years in order to provide a quantitative analysis of long-term development trends in the region since 1920.

• Equal in Reaching Aspirations (Earheart)

  Equal in Reaching Aspirations (Earheart)

  Principal Investigator

  Project: EquAl in ReacHing AspiRaTions - EARHART (2020-2023)

  Summary: Evidence concerning inequality in ability to realise aspirations is prevalent: overall, in specialised segments of the labour market, in self-employment and high-aspirations environments. Empirical literature and public debate are full of case studies and comprehensive empirical studies documenting the paramount gap between successful individuals (typically ethnic majority men) and those who are less likely to “make it” (typically ethnic minority and women). So far the drivers of these disparities and their consequences have been studied much less intensively, due to methodological constraints and shortage of appropriate data. This project proposed significant innovations to overcome both types of barriers and push the frontier of the research agenda on equality in reaching aspirations. Overall, the project was interdisciplinary, combining four fields: management, economics, quantitative methods and psychology. An important feature of this project was that it offered a diversified methodological perspective, combining applied microeconometrics, as well as experimental methods.

• Youth Employment Partnership

  Youth Employment Partnership

  Principal Investigator

  Project: Youth Employment PartnerSHIP (2018-2021)

  Summary: How effectively are young people supported on the labour market? Project “Youth Employment PartnerSHIP” aimed to answer this question by evaluating employment initiatives targeting youth in Spain, Hungary, Italy and Poland.