Excerpt

The Personnel Economics of the State. Rohini Pande, December 2015, Paper. "Governments play a central role in facilitating economic development. Yet while economists have long emphasized the importance of government quality, historically they have paid less attention to the internal workings of the state and the individuals who provide the public services. This paper reviews a nascent but growing body of field experiments that explores the personnel economics of the state. To place the experimental findings in context, we begin by documenting some stylized facts about how public sector employment differs from that in the private sector. In particular, we show that in most countries throughout the world, public sector employees enjoy a significant wage premium over their private sector counterparts. Moreover, this wage gap is largest among low-income countries, which tends to be precisely where governance issues are most severe ... " Link