The public sector hires disproportionately more educated workers. Using US microdata, we show that the education bias also holds within industries and in two thirds of 3-digit occupations. To rationalize this finding, we propose a model of private and public employment based on two features....

The effect of privatization on labor has been one of the least addressed issues. This paper evaluates the impact of privatization on dismissed workers in Turkey. Earnings equations at state employment and after dismissal are estimated and compared to evaluate the changes in worker's welfare....

We investigate the consequences of public employment on local economies. We start by presenting a spatial-equilibrium framework, to highlight that the housing market is an important channel through which a variation in public employment affects private employment. We then provide empirical...

Hundreds of millions of rural migrants have moved into Chinese cities since the early 1990s contributing greatly to economic growth, yet, they are often blamed for reducing urban 'native' workers' employment opportunities, suppressing their wages and increasing pressure on infrastructure and...

The effectiveness of public funds in increasing public employment has long been a question on public and labor economists' minds. In most federal countries local governments employ large fractions of the working population, meaning that a tool for stimulating local public employment can...

This paper evaluates the impact of public employment on private sector activity using the relocation of the German federal government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variation. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple economic...

This paper explores the labor market returns to working on a victorious political campaign. Using unique administrative data from Brazil, we track the earnings and employment of campaign workers before and after close elections spanning nearly 20 years. We identify sizable returns to working for...

We evaluate a non-targeted summer youth employment program (SYEP) for high school students aged 16-19 in Stockholm, Sweden, where public sector job offers were as good as randomly assigned. In contrast to previous studies evaluating SYEP that targeted groups with lower socioeconomic status, we...

The paper reviews the major forces that have shaped the evolution of minimum wages in Greece. It starts by providing the institutional details regarding minimum-wage fixing and coverage, and proceeds to examine the macroeconomic developments which have shaped the evolution of both the level and...