Government-run entities are often more labor-intensive than private companies, even with identical production technologies. This need not imply slack in the public sector, but may be a rational response to its wage tax advantage over private firms. A tax-favored treatment of public production...

German post-unification in the 1990s is a period that was marked by substantial economic change, part of which was East German wages building towards the much higher West German levels. This paper studies the public-private pay gap in the fast changing economic and political environment of the...

This paper studies the wage differentials between the public and private sectors in Spain, as well as its distribution across different educational levels and by gender. To do so, the well-known Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of mincerian wage regressions is applied for both sectors, breaking down...

I combine novel data on job applications and hiring decisions for the universe of public sector jobs in Brazil and a natural experiment that decreased discretion in hiring to analyze how screening determines gender application and hiring gaps. I find that hiring practices have crucial gender...

I build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with search and matching frictions and two sectors in order to study the labour market effects of public sector employment and wages. Public sector wages plays an important role in achieving the efficient allocation. High wages induce too...

We examine the interactions between public and private sector wages per employee in OECD countries. The growth of public sector wages and of public sector employment positively affects the growth of private sector wages. Moreover, total factor productivity, the unemployment rate and the degree...

Based on a unique case study-dataset, the paper analyses job satisfaction and public service motivation in Germany. A special issue of the investigation is related to the evaluation of performance pay scales that were introduced some years ago to German public employees within the frame of...

Are public sector jobs better than private sector jobs? To answer this question, this paper investigates observed differences in job satisfaction between public- and private-sector workers and disentangles the effect of worker sorting from the one caused by sector-specific job characteristics. A...

I identify wage spillovers from the public to the corporate sector with the help of a large and sudden public sector wage increase, which raised real compensation by 40 percent in two years, changing the average public wage premium from minus 10 to plus 12 percent. Using a dataset covering about...