Public sector jobs are created because governments opt to provide goods and services produced directly by public employees. Governments, however, may also choose to regulate the size of the public sector in order to stabilize targeted national employment levels. However, economic research...

This paper performs a longitudinal comparison of public and private sector pay. Although not decisive because of small sample sizes, the results tend to corroborate the conclusions of previous cross-sectional studies. Specifically, I find that on average wages of federal workers exceed those of...

This paper examines the determinants of the number and quality of outside applicants for federal job openings using a variety of time-series, cross-sectional and panel data sets. The main finding is that the application rate for government jobs increases as the ratio of federal to private sector...

This paper formally analyzes the optimal implementation of compensation schemes where the wage cannot decrease in time. Such arrangements are commonly applied to tenured academics and civil servants. We use a finite-horizon model of moral hazard to analyze the disincentive effects and the cost...

We use data from the World Values Survey to describe and compare levels of confidence in the civil service in a series of countries, and study determinants of this confidence. Instead of focusing on citizen satisfaction with specific public services in a specific country, we analyze citizens’...

Public sector retrenchment programs can generate significant savings of public expenditure. Governments are, however, often reluctant to embark upon such programs due to concerns for social costs. As a contribution to the understanding of the welfare implications of public sector retrenchment,...

Using the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's Central Personnel Data File, the author shows that gender integration of occupations proceeded from 1976 through 1992 more rapidly and steadily in the federal civil service than in the general economy. During that period, increasing numbers of...