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...

This paper presents on three new styled facts: first, schools of public affairs hire many economists; second, those economists are disproportionately female; and third, salaries in schools of public affairs are, on average, lower than salaries in mainline departments of economics. We seek to...

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...

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...

Motivated by recent debates on the possible role of wages as an income policy tool, in this study we examine the dynamic inter-relationship between wages in Bulgaria, mainly in the context of its EU accession. Relative to the WDN studies on the other EU member states, the novelty in this paper...

This paper examines wage differentials between public sector and private sector workers in Australia. After controlling for observed characteristics and individual fixed effects, we show that on average workers in the public sector earn about 5.1% percent more hourly wages than those in the...

This paper assesses the relationship between public and private wages in the EU, as measured by general government and manufacturing compensations, respectively. We find that the long-run relation between the two is stronger when the government is a large employer. Manufacturing compensations...

Public sector jobs are created because governments opt to provide goods and services produced directly by public employees. Governments, however, may also choose to regulate the size of the public sector in order to stabilize targeted national employment levels. However, economic research...

Motivated by recent debates on the possible role of wages as an income policy tool, in this study we examine the dynamic inter-relationship between wages in Bulgaria, mainly in the context of its EU accession. Relative to the WDN studies on the other EU member states, the novelty in this paper...

Examining the implications of changes in public sector wage-setting arrangements due to privatization is a relatively new area of economics research, with few studies having analyzed the effects of public sector restructuring on relative wages in developed countries. There is, however, a growing...

A model with search and matching frictions and heterogeneous workers was established to evaluate a reform of the public sector wage policy in steady-state. The model was calibrated to the UK economy based on Labour Force Survey data. A review of the pay received by all public sector workers to...

We uncover the short- and long-run structural determinants of the existing cross-country heterogeneity in public-private pay differentials for a broad set of OECD countries. We explore micro data (EU-SILC, 2004–2012) and macro data (1970–2014). Three results stand out. First, when looking at...

This paper assesses the relationship between government and manufacturing wages. We find that the long-run relation between the two wages is stronger when the government is a large employer. Manufacturing wages are better aligned with productivity and unemployment when public wages, to which...

Based on data from a cross section of U.S. metro areas, we show that public employment correlates negatively with business cycle volatility, hinting at a stabilizing effect of public employment, while public wages correlate weakly and positively with business cycle volatility, hinting at a...

We examine the relationships with firm performance of the internal pay gap among individual members of the top management team (TMT) and the compensation level of TMT members relative to their industry peers. We find that pay gap is positively related to firm performance and that this positive...