Do the retirement patterns of public-sector workers differ from those in the private sector? Most private-sector workers today face a do-it-yourself retirement income landscape characterized by an exposure to market forces through defined-contribution pension plans and private saving, and the...

Arguments in favor of school choice depend on the idea that competition between schools improves the quality of education. However, we have almost no empirical evidence on whether competition actually affects school quality. In this study, I examine the effects of inter-school competition on...

This paper contrasts the differing experience of public sector unionism, which has expanded in the United States, and private sector unionism, which has contracted, in the past several decades. It uses the experience of other countries, particularly Canada, to rule out some explanations of the...

A stylized fact in the growing literature on public sector labor markets is that estimates of public sector union wage premia are significantly lower than estimates of private sector union wage premia. In this paper I investigate the hypothesis that this difference may in part be due to the...

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...

Between 1940 and 1950 wage differentials within and between labor market groups narrowed significantly - the so-called 'Great Compression'. This paper disaggregates the Great Compression into its public and private components. Wage compression in the public sector, along with a decline in the...

The wage structure in the U.S. public sector responded sluggishly to substantial changes in private sector wages during the 1970s and 1980s. Despite a large expansion in the college/high school wage differential during the 1980s in the private sector, the public sector college wage premium...

The paper studies budgetary, financial and monetary policy evaluationand design using a comprehensive wealth or permanent income accounting framework. A set of stylized balance sheets and permanent income accountsis constructed for the public, private and overseas sectors.These are then...

In this paper we develop an accounting framework for the state and local sector which is consistent with the accounting framework for the private sector of the economy. We show that the public sector capital stock generates an imputed return which takes the form of a reduction in local taxes and...

The study of autocracies and weakly institutionalized countries is plagued by scarcity of information about the relative strength of different players within the political system. This paper presents novel data on the composition of government coalitions in a sample of fifteen post-colonial...