Public employment grew surprisingly fast in Russia during the 1990s, at a time when total employment was falling. Most of this growth occurred in the country's 89 regions, and rates varied among them. This paper seeks to explain this variation. Using panel data for 78 regions over 1992-1998 we...

The paper starts with discussing institutional framework for public sector wage setting in Russia. Given that individual choice of the sector is endogenous to wages, the authors recommend alternative econometric techniques for the public-private wage gap estimation. Applying switching regression...