I identify wage spillovers from the public to the corporate sector with the help of a large and sudden public sector wage increase, which raised real compensation by 40 percent in two years, changing the average public wage premium from minus 10 to plus 12 percent. Using a dataset covering about...

This paper studies the wage differentials between the public and private sectors in Spain, as well as its distribution across different educational levels and by gender. To do so, the well-known Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of mincerian wage regressions is applied for both sectors, breaking down...

The existing literature on inequality between private and public sectors focuses on cross-section differences in earnings levels. A more general way of looking at inequality between sectors is to recognize that forward-looking agents will care about income and job mobility too. We show that...

Direct wage comparisons show that public-sector employees earn around 15% more than private-sector employees. But should these differences be interpreted as a "public-sector premium"? Two points need to be considered. First, the public and private sectors differ in the jobs they offer and the...

We estimate the public-private sector pay gap for 27 European countries, using the 2008 EU SILC. The coefficients of conditional (on personal and job characteristics) public sector controls give a first impression on wage differences, while decompositions into explained and unexplained...

This paper considers the allocation of labour on the French and British markets, using objective wage and subjective satisfaction data. We show that, in some sectors, workers enjoy both higher wages and higher job satisfaction. We argue that this reflects labour market wage rents. Perhaps...

This paper investigates whether a public sector premium exists after controlling for observable characteristics and for additional motivations, other than monetary, that may induce workers to prefer employment in the public sector. We study the entire conditional wage distribution on Italian...

This study investigates the public-private sector wage gap in Latvia using microdata from the labour force survey. The severity of public sector wage cuts employed as a response to the economic crisis and subsequent recovery provides a test bed to analyse whether and how the public-private...

We propose an assignment model in which positions along a hierarchy are attributed to individuals depending on their characteristics. Our theoretical framework can be used to study differences in assignment and outcomes across groups and we show how it can motivate decomposition and...