After a protracted legal and political battle, on March 11, 2011, the Wisconsin state Legislature passed Act 10, the Budget Repair Act, which increased public employee contributions toward pensions and health coverage and restricted union powers of collective bargaining and dues collection. This...

Studies relying upon household survey data have concluded that public school teachers receive substantially lower salaries than comparably-educated private sector workers. However, any given level of formal educational attainment found in household surveys can encompass a wide range of skills as...

This paper ranks all 50 states according to how costly their public-employee compensation packages are relative to private-sector standards. Each state's package is placed into one of five categories: modest penalty, market level, modest premium, large premium, or very large premium. The results...

A November 2011 Heritage Foundation report — “Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers” — presented data on teacher salaries and benefits in order to inform debates about teacher compensation reform. The report concluded that public-school teacher compensation is far ahead of...

Studies relying upon household survey data have concluded that public school teachers receive substantially lower salaries than comparably-educated private sector workers. However, any given level of formal educational attainment found in household surveys can encompass a wide range of skills as...

One of the most challenging issues in assessing teacher compensation is determining how much time teachers spend working compared to other professionals. Previous attempts to answer this question have used data that are either unreliable, not generalizable to other professions, or both. We use...

Public sector compensation has come under increased scrutiny from politicians and the media, but comprehensive technical comparisons of federal and private compensation have been largely absent from the discussion. Drawing from the academic literature and using the most recent government data,...