We assess whether public sector employees have a stronger inclination to serve others and are more risk averse than employees in the private sector. A unique feature of our study is that we use revealed rather than stated preferences data. Respondents of a large-scale survey were offered a...

This research note uses two German datasets the large-scale German Socioeconomic Panel and unique data from own student questionnaires to analyse the relationship between risk aversion and the choice for public sector employment. Main results are (1) more risk-averse individuals sort into public...