The public sector hires disproportionately more educated workers. Using US microdata, we show that the education bias also holds within industries and in two thirds of 3-digit occupations. To rationalize this finding, we propose a model of private and public employment based on two features....

The types of workers recruited into teaching and their allocation across classrooms can greatly influence a country's stock of human capital. This paper considers how markets and non-market institutions determine the quantity, wages, skills, and spatial distribution of teachers in developing...

We set up a model with search and matching frictions to understand the effects of employment and wage policies, as well as nepotism in hiring in the public sector, on unemployment and rent seeking. Conditional on inefficiently high public-sector wages, more nepotism in public-sector hiring...

Does flexible pay increase the gender wage gap? To answer this question we analyze the wages of public-school teachers in Wisconsin, where a 2011 reform allowed school districts to set teachers' pay more flexibly and engage in individual negotiations. Using quasi-exogenous variation in the...

Despite a global trend of wage decentralization over the past 30 years, we know very little about the labor market implications of decentralized wage determination. A main reason is the lack of exogenous variation in wage regulation linked to detailed outcome data. Using Swedish registry data...

We study the effects of introducing a performance-based promotion program for teachers in Sweden. The program intended to make the teaching profession more attractive by raising wages for skilled teachers and taking advantage of teachers' professional competence. Our results show that: (i)...

Military conscription implicitly taxes draftees. Those who would have volunteered at the market wage may be forced to serve for lower wages, and those with higher opportunity costs may be forced to serve regardless, yet little is known about the distribution of this burden. We exploit the Danish...

This paper studies how increasing teacher compensation at hard-to-staff schools can reduce inequality in access to qualifed teachers. Leveraging an unconditional change in the teacher compensation structure in Perú, we first show causal evidence that increasing salaries at less desirable...

This paper studies how wages respond to a sudden change in employer concentration. It exploits a reform that deregulated the Swedish pharmacy market, which until 2009 was a monopoly. The reform involved a substantial increase in the number of employers on the pharmacy labor market. However, the...

While it is widely established that higher wages attract more productive individuals into teaching, it is unclear if salaries can be used to motivate existing teachers to work harder, or more productively, in any way that affects pupil outcomes. Using teachers' predicted relative wages,...