Ex ante returns, the net value that agents perceive before they take an investment decision, are understood as the main drivers of individual decisions. Hence, their distribution in a population is an important tool for counterfactual analysis and policy evaluation. This paper studies the...

This research note uses two German data sets the large-scale German Socio-Economic Panel and unique data from own student questionnaires to analyse the relationship between risk aversion and the choice for public sector employment. Main results are: (1) more risk averse individuals sort into...

Having highly educated workers can be beneficial for organizations in terms of innovation and problem-solving capabilities, however when underpaid and underemployed, overeducated workers may experience feelings of frustration and stagnation as they are unable to fully utilize their skills and...

In many African countries the efficiency of public services deteriorated after independence as governments hired too many employees, allowed earnings to erode and performance standards to decline. Various explanations have been offered for this. Some have focused on the state's role as an...

The paper discusses gender differences with regard to the self- and reciprocal estimation of career expectations. Firstly, the theoretical background and the literature are identified. Within this frame, the instance of self-under-estimated career prospects of female workers and statistical...

One of the dominant changes in academics during the last 25 years has been the steadily growing political pressure on universities to strengthen their links with and knowledge transfers to external partners. This focus on university-industry collaboration has been accompanied by another...

In this study we quantify the size and drivers of the contemporary gender pay gap among medical doctors employed in the UK public sector. In using nationally representative data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, we make comparisons to doctors employed in the private sector, as well...

We use HILDA data from 2001 - 2006 to analyse the source of the gender wage gap across public- and private-sector wage distributions in Australia. We are particularly interested in the role of gender segregation within sector-specific occupations in explaining relative wages. We find that,...

Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuableskills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match betweenjob characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on subjective well-being it ispossible to...

The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy’s best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a perfectly...