We investigate whether public and private sector employees differ in terms of public service motivation using a representative sample of elderly workers from 12 European countries. We find that public sector workers, both those currently employed and those already retired, are significantly more...

Corruption is the great disease of government. It undermines the efficiency of the public sector in many countries around the world. We experimentally study civic engagement (CE) as a constraint on corruption when incentives are stacked against providing CE. We show that CE is powerful in...

A relatively high labor-intensity in government-run entities need not imply slack in their organization. Rather, it is a rational reaction to various forms of wage tax advantage that the public sector has over private firms. Even though an unequal tax treatment of public and private sectors...

Recent research has highlighted social image and identity concerns as factors that influence economic decisions. Given that an individual’s choice of employment may be important for their social image, we consider a model of worker sorting into the mission-oriented or private sector with...

In our model, an agent produces an outcome by a costly effort and then distributes it among heterogeneous users. The agents̕ payoff is the weighted sum of the users ̕shares and the coefficient reflecting their heterogeneity. When the agent neglects users ̕heterogeneity the game leads to an...

This paper analyses the optimal tax policy and public provision of private goods when individuals differ in two respects: income-earning ability and rationality. Publicly provided goods should be overprovided or subsidised, relative to the decentralised optimum, if society’s marginal valuation...