More about me

I am a professor of Economics at Norwegian School of Economics and head of the Department of Economics (2018-2021).

I am particularly interested in how law and its enforcement determine resource allocation in an economy. My main research projects in this direction are on "Imperfect enforcement of financial contracts" (with Tore Ellingsen) and "Licensing and Innovation with Imperfect Enforcement" (with Richard Gilbert). At the moment I am working on a new paper with the tentative title "Law and Location". In this paper we examine how improved contracting possibilities due to better institutions can explain how firms reallocate across countries. Next step would be to examine the political economy of contracting institutions. I plan to do more.

I also do research on labour markets and focus on turnover and wage policies for workers. In the paper "Management of Knowledge Workers" (with Hans Hvide) we discussed how firms' intellectual property rights and litigation of departing workers interacted with firms' wage policies and workers effort to create new business opportunities for firms. In a new paper "Fair and Square: A Retention Model of Managerial Compensation" (with Tore Ellingsen) we demonstrate in a model where contracts serve as reference points how a large set of compensation practices of can be rationalized. In a new project we show that if employment options are used for rentention purposes in a competitive labour market, the employer should allow hedging or sale of stock options. This paper provides a rationale for why it is common to allow for hedging of stock options.

I started out by doing research in industrial economics and it remains one of my main interests. My PhD was on firms strategic investments in research and development. More recently I have become more interested in communication (cheap talk) between firms and buyers and between firms and investors.

Apart from research and teaching, I am a board member of Enova. Enova is a company owned by the Norwegian Government supporting private initiatives to reduce emission of greenhouse gasses, energy consumption and the use of fossil fuel. I was also recently a member of an expert committee appointed by the Norwegian Government suggesting improvements in the Norwegian Company Act (report)