This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to an income loss. We exploit an unexpected 25% wage cut incurred in 2010 by all Romanian public sector employees, including the public education staff. We investigate a corruptible high-stake exam taking place shortly after the wage...

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...

This paper presents a model of wage-employment determination in private and public sectors, which allows us to analyze the effects of different institutional arrangements on labor market equilibria. In particular, it focuses on how different degrees of coordination in decision processes affect...

This paper employs a novel dataset on government wages to investigate the relationship between government remuneration policy and corruption. Our dataset, as derived from national household or labor surveys, is more reliable than the data on government wages as used in previous research. When...

This paper analysis the link between political strength and public sector wages using a unique matched individual-employer data set for Norwegian local governments during the period 1990-1998. The results indicate that political strength, measured in several ways, has a positive effect on wages,...

We investigate whether left-wing governments decrease wage inequality among civil servants. The data is based on salaries of civil servants in the German states. Since a reform in 2006, German state governments are allowed to design salaries of civil servants. We employ encompassing data for pay...

This paper deals with double lobbying: several bureaucrats participate in joint lobbying to get a high total departmental budget, but they also engage in antagonistic lobbying to reap as high a share of the total budget as possible. The antagonistic lobbying constitutes a contest among the...

Historically, people have often expressed negative feelings toward speculators, a sentiment that might have even been reinforced since the latest financial crisis, during which taxpayer money was warranted or spent to bail out reckless investors. In this paper, we conjecture that judges may also...

We present new data documenting medieval Europeś "Commercial Revolution" using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to test whether medieval universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the foundation of Germanyś first...

It is generally argued that, in the context of Imperial Germany, public primary education was used to form "loyal citizens" and to build a nation. In this paper we analyze to what extent central spending on primary education affected participation at general elections and votes for...