Public sector employees receive large fractions of their lifetime income in the form of deferred compensation. The introduction of the opportunity provided to Illinois public school employees to purchase additional pension benefits allows me to estimate employees' willingness-to-pay for benefits...

We analyze the incidence of public-employee health benefits. Because these benefits are negotiated through the political process, relevant labor market institutions deviate significantly from the competitive, private-sector benchmark. Empirically, we find that roughly 15 percent of the cost of...

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...

Recent studies have emphasized the importance of the quality of politicians for good government and consequently economic performance. But if the quality of leadership matters, then understanding what motivates individuals to become politicians and perform competently in office becomes a central...

Governments play a central role in facilitating economic development. Yet while economists have long emphasized the importance of government quality, historically they have paid less attention to the internal workings of the state and the individuals who provide the public services. This paper...

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...

This paper argues that public sector labor relations is best understood in a framework that focuses on unions' ability to shift demand curves rather than to raise wages, as is the case in the private sector. It reviews the public sector labor relations literature and finds that: (i) public...

We examine the labor supply of politicians using data on Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). We exploit the introduction of a law that equalized MEPs' salaries, which had previously differed by as much as a factor of ten. Doubling an MEP's salary increases the probability of running for...

This study analyzes a new set of data on the decisions of conventional arbitrators. The main goal is to draw inferences about the extent to which conventional arbitration decisions are fashioned as mechanical compromises of the parties' final offers, without reference to the exogenous facts...

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...