We examine earnings records for 90,000 classroom teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001-02 and 2006-07 school years, roughly 20,000 of whom left teaching during that time. Among grade 4-8 teachers leaving for other industries, a 1 standard deviation increase in estimated...

I examine the extent to which public sector outsourcing relates to public employment in OECD countries. I use new panel data on public sector outsourcing. The sample includes 26 countries over the period 2009-2015. Contrary to common expectations, the results do not suggest that public sector...

A growing literature connects labor market hardships to stronger preferences for government welfare and redistribution programs. Potential preference shifts with respect to other types of state involvement in the economy, however, have gone unexplored. We draw on both longitudinal and...

This paper analysis the link between political strength and public sector wages using a unique matched individual-employer data set for Norwegian local governments during the period 1990-1998. The results indicate that political strength, measured in several ways, has a positive effect on wages,...

We employ a comprehensive matched employer-employee data set for Brazil to analyze wage determinants and compare results to Abowd, Kramarz, Margolis and Troske (2001) for French and U.S. manufacturing. Returns to education and experience in Brazilian manufacturing exceed those of the other...

Public service reforms often provoke political backlash. Can they also yield political benefits for the politicians who champion them? We study a Wisconsin law that weakened teachers' unions and liberalized pay, prompting mass protests. Exploiting its staggered implementation across school...

Efficiency wages theories argue that the threat of firing, coupled with a high unemployment rate, is a mechanism that discourages employee shirking in asymmetric information contexts. Our empirical analysis aims to verify the role of unemployment as a worker discipline device, considering the...

We assess whether public sector employees have a stronger inclination to serve others and are more risk averse than employees in the private sector. A unique feature of our study is that we use revealed rather than stated preferences data. Respondents of a large-scale survey were offered a...

We conducted a randomized controlled trial involving nearly 700 customer-service representatives (CSRs) in a Canadian government service agency to study whether providing CSRs with performance feedback with or without peer comparison affected their subsequent organ donor registration rates....

The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial and non-managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a...