Regional productivity differences provide scope for productivity-enhancing labor mobility. Redistribution reduces relocation incentives through higher taxes or lower transfers. Combining an intensive labor supply margin with an extensive, productivity-enhancing migration margin, we determine how...

Previous research has established that good-looking political candidates win more votes. We extend this line of research by examining differences between parties on the left and on the right of the political spectrum. Our study combines data on personal votes in real elections with a web survey...

This paper argues that high political competition does not necessarily induce policy makers to perform better as previous research has shown. We develop a political economy model and we show that when political competition is tight, and elected politicians can rely on more tax instruments, they...

Efficiency wages theories argue that the threat of firing, coupled with a high unemployment rate, is a mechanism that discourages employee shirking in asymmetric information contexts. Our empirical analysis aims to verify the role of unemployment as a worker discipline device, considering the...

This paper estimates the causal effect of the wage on the recruitment rate at the establishment level. During the 1990s, the wage setting for certified teachers in Norway was completely centralized, with a wage premium of about 10 percent at schools with severe recruitment problems in the past...

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...

We examine differences in altruism and laziness between public sector employees and private sector employees. Our theoretical model predicts that the likelihood of public sector employment increases with a worker’s altruism, and increases or decreases with a worker’s laziness depending on...