The monopoly position of the public bureaucracy in providing public services allows government employees to acquire rents. Those rents can involve higher wages, monetary and non-monetary fringe benefits (e.g., pensions and staffing), and/or bribes. We propose a direct measure to capture the...

Thanks to extraordinary and exponential improvements in data storage and computing capacities, it is now possible to collect, manage, and analyze data in magnitudes and in manners that would have been inconceivable just a short time ago. As the world has developed this remarkable capacity to...

The public sector hires disproportionately more educated workers. Using US microdata, we show that the education bias also holds within industries and in two thirds of 3-digit occupations. To rationalize this finding, we propose a model of private and public employment based on two features....

On 1 January 1999, four major reforms took effect in Poland in the areas of health, education, pensions and local administration. After 20 years, only in the last case does the original structural design remain essentially unchanged. We examine the implications of this reform from the...

We show theoretically that when larger firms pay higher wages and are more likely to becaught defaulting on labour taxes, then large high-wage firms will be in the formal sector andsmall low-wage firms will be in the informal sector...

State and federal reforms of the 1990s transformed the U.S. cash assistance program forsingle parents and their children. Despite an extensive literature examining these changesand their impacts, there have been few studies that consider the effects of these reformsfrom the perspective of the...

In many countries, non-compliance with minimum wage legislation is widespread, andauthorities may be seen as having turned a blind eye to a legislation that they havethemselves passed. But if enforcement is imperfect, how effective can a minimum wage be?And if non-compliance is widespread, why...

Academic entrepreneurship has become an increasingly important channel through whichuniversities contribute to economic development. This paper studies academic entrepreneursusing a comprehensive venture capital database...

This paper reports on a two-tiered experiment designed to separately identify the selection and effort margins of pay-for-performance (P4P). At the recruitment stage, teacher labor markets were randomly assigned to a pay- for-percentile or fixed-wage contract. Once recruits were placed, an...

This paper examines whether contacts between caseworkers in public employment officesand employers impact on the reemployment chances of the unemployed they counsel. Thisanalysis is made possible through a large administrative dataset on unemployed combinedwith an extensive survey of...