Kjersti-Gro Lindquist

Bio: Kjersti-Gro Lindquist is an academic researcher from The RiverBank. The author has contributed to research in topics: Household debt & Scale (ratio). The author has an hindex of 13, co-authored 27 publications receiving 771 citations. Previous affiliations of Kjersti-Gro Lindquist include Norges Bank & Statistics Norway.

Evaluation of macroeconomic models for financial stability analysis

Abstract: As financial stability has gained focus in economic policymaking, the demand for analyses of financial stability and the consequences of economic policy has increased Alternative macroeconomic models are available for policy analyses, and this paper evaluates the usefulness of some models from the perspective of financial stability Financial stability analyses are complicated by the lack of a clear and consensus definition of ‘financial stability’, and the paper concludes that operational definitions of this term must be expected to vary across alternative models Furthermore, since assessment of financial stability in general is based on a wide range of risk factors, one can not expect one single model to satisfactorily capture all the risk factors Rather, a suite of models is needed This is in particular true for the evaluation of risk factors originating and developing inside and outside the financial system respectively

Heterogeneity in Returns to Scale: A Random Coefficient Analysis with Unbalanced Panel Data

Abstract: This paper analyses the importance of scale economies by means of unbalanced plant-level panel data from three Norwegian manufacturing industries. Focus is on heterogeneous technologies, and unlike most previous work on micro data, the model description includes heterogeneity in both the scale properties (the slope coefficients) and the intercept term, represented by random coefficients in the production function. Three (nested) functional forms are investigated: the Translog, an extended Cobb-Douglas, and the strict Cobb-Douglas. Although constant or moderately increasing returns to scale is found for the average plant, the results reveal considerable variation across plants. Variations in both input and scale elasticities are to a larger extent due to randomness of the production function parameters than to systematic differences in the input mix.

Exploring the change in skill structure of labour demand in Norwegian manufacturing

Abstract: In most OECD-countries, labour demand has shifted from unskilled to skilled over time. Many analyses of this phenomenon focus on either the effect of technical change, capital-skill complementarity or labour-labour substitution. We present a more general analysis of labour demand in Norwegian manufacturing, and estimate a multivariate error-correction model of the cost-shares of skilled and unskilled labour, materials and energy on industry-level panel data. The results show that skilled-biased technical change, primarily due to a positive effect on skilled labour and less due to a negative effect on unskilled labour, as well as labour-labour substitution and capital stock growth are important for explaining the shift in Norwegian labour demand. Of minor importance is also non-homotheticity.

Pursuing Financial Stability Under an Inflation-Targeting Regime

Abstract: We evaluate two main views on pursuing financial stability within a flexible inflation-targeting regime. It appears that potential gains from an activist or precautionary approach to promoting financial stability are highly shock dependent. We find support for the conventional view that concern for financial stability generally warrants a longer target horizon for inflation. The preferred target horizon depends on the financial stability indicator and the shock. An extension of the target horizon favoring financial stability may contribute to relatively higher variation in inflation and output.

A Treatise on the Family

Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A New Way to Measure Competition

Abstract: This article introduces a new way to measure competition based on firms' profits. Within a general model, we derive conditions under which this measure is monotone in competition, where competition can be intensified both through a fall in entry barriers and through more aggressive interaction between players. The measure is shown to be more robust theoretically than the price cost margin. This allows for an empirical test of the problems associated with the price cost margin as a measure of competition.