Federal, state, and local budget issues in the aftermath of the Great Recession stimulated a revival of interest in government worker pay. In the paper, we study the evolution of the federal-private pay differential from 1995 to 2017 using Current Population Survey data, enabling us to examine...

The gender wage inequality in Korea has been higher than in any other OECD country since 1996. In this paper, we study the evolution of the differentials between genders in wages and job satisfaction from 2008 to 2018 using the Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey. Wage regressions are...

This paper is an overview of thoughts about controlling federal spending. At the outset, I note my concern that federal spending is too high and comes at the detriment of good incentives, productivity, and growth. I review the market-oriented economist's view of the proper role of government and...

This paper discusses how economic systems can be described by the manner that property rights are allocated to individuals, to the government, or to interests groups. Property rights entail control of use of assets, claim on the net income from an asset, and transferability of the previous two....

The coevolution of trust in government alongside the growth of government is an aspect of research on the latter topic that has not been explored. We consider this coevolution in the context of a political economy model and a public interest view of government growth and incorporate the role of...

We examine national trends in educational funding, test score outcomes, and productivity as well as variations in funding and test scores over time and across states to assess how changes in educational spending are (or are not) related to changes in educational test score outcomes for states....

Kentucky’s K-12 experienced an 81% in increase in per pupil funds, after inflation, from 1990 to 2019. However, there have been only modest changes in its nationally-administered test scores, and no increases in the past decade. Moreover, per pupil funding seems to exceed that of all but the...

This paper applies several fundamentals of the economics of organizations and principal-agent theory to the governance of schools, the use of teacher incentive pay, the performance of schools, and school reform efforts. We analyze schools as we do firms. We then focus on using the results to...

A feature of post-World War II economic history is the growth in government, paradoxically accompanied by a decline in trust of government. How does a mistrusted institution continue to grow? We utilize key findings in the economics, behavioral, and psychology literatures to develop a model to...

In the Journal of Political Economy, Rodrik (1998) finds a positive association between the openness of an economy and its government size. He explains this paradox by arguing that government expenditures are used to provide social insurance against the risk of terms of trade shocks that open...