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...

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...

We study the impact of graduating in a recession in Flanders (Belgium), i.e. in a rigid labor market. In the presence of a high minimum wage, a typical recession hardly influences the hourly wage of low educated men, but reduces working time and earnings by about 4.5% up to twelve years after...

Using employer-employee panel data, we provide novel facts on how real wages and working hours within jobs responded to the UK’s Great Recession. In contrast to previous studies, our data enables us to address the cyclical composition of jobs. We show that firms were able to respond to the...

We investigate whether left-wing governments decrease wage inequality among civil servants. The data is based on salaries of civil servants in the German states. Since a reform in 2006, German state governments are allowed to design salaries of civil servants. We employ encompassing data for pay...

This paper exploits a 2018 reform of teachers' financial incentives to work in some French disadvantaged schools. Based on this quasi-natural experiment, it evaluates the impact of those incentives on teachers' stated preferences to move to such schools. Using data from the internal human...

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....

We evaluate a guaranteed job program launched in 2020 in Austria. Our evaluation is based on three approaches, pairwise matched randomization, a pre-registered synthetic control at the municipality level, and a comparison to individuals in control municipalities. This allows us to estimate...

Using information from all IMF conditionality programs from 1990 to 2018, we implement a dynamic Augmented Inverse Probability Weighting Regression Adjustment approach to examine the effects of programs, including public sector dismissals, on the size of the shadow economy. The estimated effect...

We exploit a series of public-sector entity relocations in South Korea as an exogenous source of variation in public sector employment to estimate the local employment multiplier. We find that the introduction of one public sector employment position increases private sector employment by one...