We study the private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians. Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician-bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of bureaucrats ran for political...

A booming literature has argued that mission-based motives are a central feature of mission-oriented labor markets. This paper shifts the focus to task-based motivation and finds that it yields significantly more effort than mission-based motivation. Moreover, in the presence of significant task...

The size of the public sector in terms of employment and compensation has a strong life-cycle dimension. We establish a quantitative partial-equilibrium life-cycle model with incomplete markets, private and public sectors, and risk-averse workers, and use it to (i) calculate three dimensions of...

Countries strive to upgrade their civil service quality in many directions, thus responding to major contemporary challenges and following the trends of open innovation. The 2030 civil servant will require a wide set of soft and hard skills that are not common among the today’s public...

Politicians can use the public sector to give jobs to cronies, at the expense of the efficiency of those organisations and general welfare. In this paper, we regress monthly hires across all firms in Portugal with some degree of public ownership on the country's 1980-2018 political cycle. We...

This article discusses the Brazilian civil service evolution and patterns of change in each level and branch of government, from 1986 to 2017. Our analysis covers the total personnel, schooling, and distribution by sex, mean and median wages as well as the total government spending on active...

While men occupy the majority of senior positions in the Civil Service, they are more likely than women to perceive gender bias in promotional competitions, according to an ESRI study. The study draws on survey responses from 904 Civil Servants within the Department of Agriculture, Food and the...

We study the private gains to bureaucrats from their political alignment with elected politicians. Whereas existing studies generally rely on proxies for politician-bureaucrat political alignment, a rare feature of our data allows measuring it directly since 27% of bureaucrats ran for political...

Public sector employees are often said to have excessive rates of absence from work. Using representative survey data for Germany, we indeed find absenteeism of employees to be higher in the public than the private sector. The differences in the incidence and days of absence showing up in...

Public sector employees are often said to have excessive rates of absence from work. Using representative survey data for Germany, we indeed find absenteeism of employees to be higher in the public than the private sector. The differences in the incidence and days of absence showing up in...

The paper explores the public-private wage gap in the Russian economy over time and along the whole wage distribution. Using the RLMS-HSE panel data set, we examine how gaps at various points of wage distribution changed from 2005 to 2015 and present decompositions of the gaps into components...

This paper aims to study the shortcomings and merits of the first experiment of quasi-market in the provision of employment services: the Lombardy DUL (Dote Unica Lavoro). This system, which has inspired the 2015 national reform within the Jobs Act, has reactivated and revitalized the sector by...

This paper studies whether the decentralization of public employment services (PES) increases job placements among the unemployed. Decentralizing PES has been a widely applied reform used by governments aiming to enhance their efficacy. However, economic theory is ambiguous about its effects,...

This paper aims to study the shortcomings and merits of the first experiment of quasi-market in the provision of employment services: the Lombardy DUL (Dote Unica Lavoro). This system, which has inspired the 2015 national reform within the Jobs Act, has reactivated and revitalized the sector by...

Most of the existing evidence on the effectiveness of family leave policies comes from studies focusing on their impacts on affected families - that is, mothers, fathers, and their children - without a clear understanding of the costs and effects on firms and coworkers. We use data from Denmark...

"Analyzes the expansion and restriction of public sector collective bargaining rights in the United States over a 50 year period. Grounded in research on the policy process and labor unions, this book argues that the politics of restriction are different from the politics of expansion."

A booming literature has argued that mission-based motives are a central feature of mission-oriented labor markets. This paper shifts the focus to task-based motivation and finds that it yields significantly more effort than mission-based motivation. Moreover, in the presence of significant task...

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...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of job satisfaction practices for public sector employees through a cross-national approach. Design/methodology/approach: A multi-group analysis was carried out using SmartPLS3 among non-teaching employees of public universities in...