Public service reforms often provoke political backlash. Can they also yield political benefits for the politicians who champion them? We study a Wisconsin law that weakened teachers' unions and liberalized pay, prompting mass protests. Exploiting its staggered implementation across school...

This paper provides evidence for the existence of a wage curve -- a micro-econometric association between the level of pay and the local unemployment rate -- in modern U.S. data. Consistent with recent evidence from more than 40 other countries, the wage curve in the United States has a long-run...

Following Phillip's original work on the UK, applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time-series data sets. However, it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models. This paper adopts a different...

This paper, which follows in an LSE tradition begun by Phillips and Sargan, examines the role of unemployment in shaping pay. In contrast to most of the literature, it 1) uses microeconometric data on individuals and workplaces 2) examines a variety of data sets as a check on the robustness of...

We estimate the size of the likely unofficial income of a household with a government official by the difference between the income that would be necessary to explain their observed home purchase behavior and the official income. Using unique and comprehensive administrative records on the House...

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...

Unlike performance incentives for private sector managers, little is known about performance incentives for managers in public sector bureaucracies. Through a randomized trial in rural China, we study performance incentives rewarding school administrators for reducing student anemia--as well as...

Our main findings include the following: First, taking into account differences in characteristics among workers does not eliminate sectoral differences in the likelihood of losing one's job. After accounting for worker characteristics, during both recessionary and non-recessionary periods, the...

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...

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...