We use a sample of full-time workers over 50 years of age from the 2004 and 2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study to investigate whether workers in federal, state, and local government receive more generous wage and pension compensation than private sector workers, ceteris paribus. With...

Studies of public/private sector wage differentials typically assume that the govenment and union status of a worker are exogenous variables. Recently, some studies have relaxed this assumption slightly by allowing the union status to be endogenous. In this paper, we consider a more general...

This study addresses the legal principle of "comparability" that ties federal sector wages to wages in the private sector. We first examine comparability by determining if workers with similar observed and unobserved characteristics receive the same wages in each sector. Estimates based on data...

This paper asks whether pay disclosure in the public sector changes wage setting at the top of the public sector distribution. I examine a 2010 California mandate that required municipal salaries to be posted online. Among top managers, disclosure led to approximately 7 percent average...

Employer-provided benefits are a large and growing share of compensation costs. In this paper, I consider three factors that can affect the value created by employer-sponsored benefits. First, firms have a comparative advantage (for example, due to scale economies or tax treatment) in purchasing...

Proponents of comparable worth assert that within a firm jobs can be valued in terms of the skill, effort and responsibility they require, as well as the working conditions they offer, and that jobs that are of comparable worth to the firm should receive equal compensation. After documenting the...

This paper uses data from the U.S. Decennial Census and the Current Population Surveys to document the differential shifts that occurred in the wage structures of the public and privatesectors between 1960 and 2000. The wage gap between the typical public sector worker and a comparable private...